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Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2024

Geography: USA

Julia Oh’s project aims to develop a novel and more physiological approach to studying how microbes interact with human skin cells and the effects of this interaction on overall skin health.

The human skin microbiome – encompassing hundreds of bacterial and fungal species – has essential roles in maintaining skin health. Skin microbiome dysfunction can contribute to diverse skin infections, inflammatory disorders, and skin cancer.

It is important to both identify the microbe–skin cell interactions that go awry in skin disease and to evaluate the therapeutic potential of new approaches for treating skin diseases. However, a detailed mechanistic understanding of how various skin microbes interact with human cells to maintain skin health or promote skin disease is currently lacking.

The goal of Julia Oh’s project is to determine how diverse skin microbes impact the essential functions of skin cells. However, there are few experimental models that allow us to investigate the diversity of skin microbes in a physiologically relevant way.

To enable a detailed investigation of microbe–skin cell interactions and their effects on skin health, Julia Oh and her team will model microbial colonization in cultured skin tissue that is genetically modified to investigate skin cell mechanisms. Then, using metabolomics and computational models, they will identify microbial metabolites to reveal microbial mechanisms.

This new approach could broadly enable biomedical researchers to determine how microbe–skin cell interactions impact skin functions, immunity, and susceptibility to diseases arising from microbial infection, and inform potential preventative and therapeutic strategies that harness the microbiome.