2. Results
groin
We collected skin swabs from 72 very preterm infants from the axilla, ear, and groin on days 1, 7, 14, and 21 after birth. Microbiome analysis was performed on samples with sufficient DNA content from 672 swab samples, from a total of 56 infants (28 infants each in intervention and control arms, respectively). The demographics of participants are described in For skin-microbiome analysis, a total of 52,972,312 reads were obtained from 672 swab samples. A total of 14,912 ASVs were assigned to reads after denoising with the DADA2 pipeline. The ASVs were assigned to 34 phyla, 81 classes, 209 orders, 354 families, 819 genera, and 540 species. We identified 40 ASVs as potential contaminants, using the Decontam pipeline [