The skin is red, itchy, peeling and bleeding: typical signs of atopic eczema, also known as neurodermatitis. About four million people in Germany are said to be infected with this non-contagious inflammatory skin disease. Treating and curing them permanently is not easy. But a new approach may emerge if the role of bacterial flora on the skin is better understood. So a working group led by Paulo Winder Gomez of the University of California, San Diego, compared the microbiome of healthy people with that of people with the skin lesion. They previously published their study on bioRxiv.
To conduct their study, the team took skin samples from 30 people, then analyzed their microbiome using genetic sequencing. Overall, half of people with atopic eczema have reduced bacterial diversity on the skin. Instead, they had much higher levels of both bacteria Staphylococcus aureus And Staphylococcus epidermidis They are normal components of the skin flora, but can also cause skin changes such as blisters and other infections if they multiply pathologically.
In a second step, the team then used mass spectrometry to look for molecules on the skin that are involved in inflammatory reactions. Here, too, it was found to a greater extent in people with eczema: they had higher concentrations of aspartylphenylalanine, leucylproline, and N-acetylmethionine on their skin.
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