Ricerc@Sapienza

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease clinically characterized by periodic flares of dry, red, itchy skin lesions that may extend involving all the skin surface in most severe forms. Its prevalence is remarkably increased in the last decades, becoming one of the major public health problems in Western countries. Adult patients with AD had significantly impaired health-related quality of life because of the impact of the disease on work, sleep, and social relations. The pathogenesis of AD is not well understood; complex interactions between defective skin barrier, recurrent infections, and immune system imbalance have been shown. Recently, loss of microbial diversity and over-abundance of certain microbial species on skin surfaces has been observed in patients affected by AD. It is known that skin commensal organisms play important role in promoting normal immune system functions and preventing the colonization of pathogens. Dysbiosis has been hypothesized to play a role in AD progression; however, variations of skin microbiota composition during the different phases of the disease is still mainly unknown.
The aim of this study is to understand if and how skin microbiota composition vary during the different phases of the disease (baseline, flare, post flare). In this research we propose, for the first time, an integrated metagenomic and culturomic approach, in order to achieve a better knowledge of variation in microbial composition at species and strains-level, to analyse the functional differences between strains within a single species and to isolate species and strains that will lets us to understand the functional consequences of strain-level variation within species