show Abstracthide AbstractThis study explores differences in the skin microbiomes between young atopic and non-atopic adults in Finnish and Russian Karelia. As regions proximate to one another, Finnish and Russian Karelia are geo-climatically similar, and the populations partly share ancestry but represent distinct environmental exposures and lifestyles. Since the 1950s, the socioeconomic gap between the North Karelia in Finland (Finnish Karelia) and the Republic of Karelia in Russia (Russian Karelia) has been widening. While rapid urbanization and modernization have occurred in Finland, many households in Russian Karelia continue to follow a small-scale agricultural lifestyle. In Finnish Karelia, allergies are significantly more prevalent and have increased across generations compared to Russian Karelia where the prevalence has remained low. In this study, skin metagenomic sequences were obtained from skin swab samples from the volar forearm. The public sequencing reads from our study are quality filtered and trimmed, and reads mapping to the human genome have been removed.