Cutaneous Microbiome and Inflammation Section

The Cutaneous Microbiome and Inflammation Section uses genomics to study the skin microbes in healthy individuals and patients with skin diseases and to expand our understanding of host-microbe interactions.

Our group studies the diversity and complexity of bacterial, fungal, and viral communities in healthy skin and in eczema from patients with atopic dermatitis and with primary immunodeficiencies. We integrate advanced genomic sequencing methods to investigate clinical samples and cultured isolates to more deeply understand these human microbial communities. Our work has demonstrated how the skin microbiome is patterned based on the location on the body surface (Grice et al., Science. 2009;  Findley et al., Nature. 2013; Oh et al., Nature. 2014; Oh, Byrd et al., Cell. 2016), and can be distinguished in certain skin diseases and with specific immunodeficiencies (Kong et al., Genome Research. 2012; Byrd et al., Science Translational Medicine. 2017; Oh et al., Genome Research. 2013; Tirosh et al., Nature Medicine . 2018)

These studies have highlighted how the host shapes, and in turn may be shaped by, the skin microbiome. Our current efforts continue to explore these host-microbial interactions.

Research Focus

Our highly collaborative group studies the complexity of the microbial communities residing in and on the human body. We are focused on: 

• Investigating the alterations in the human skin microbiome related to skin diseases, primary immunodeficiencies, and therapeutic interventions.
• Utilizing advances in microbiome and transcriptome sequencing to explore host-skin microbe interactions.

The translational team approach has been successful in integrating clinical medicine, genomics, microbiology, and immunology to study the role of staphylococci in atopic dermatitis as well as microbes in patients with immunodeficiencies. Our mission is to understand how microbes interact with the human host to elicit or ameliorate disease.