Quaranskin, a combination of quarantine and skin, is a project based on the collection
and analysis of skin microbiome samples, collected from participants across Europe.
We aim to understand if there are correlations between behavioral characteristics that
involve activity, hygiene and human interaction, and the diversity and composition of
skin microbes at four body sites.
Study Pipeline
Participants recruitment
Emails are sent to all the members of our institution, the CRI, and all the european
iGEMers, by focusing on people form countries where confinement or social distanciation
are set up. The total number of participants expected is 70.
Participants enrollment
To be involved in the study each participants has to fill in a participation form and
link to it a signed and dated consent form.
A link is sent to them allowing them to create a account on the OpenHumans platform in
order to furnish them an ID code which we use to keep anonymity
Participants action
Once they are officially enroll in the study, we send to the participants by mail a kit
containing all tools needed to sample microbiome from 4 body sites and to send them back
to us, and by email a link to answer an online questionnaire asking questions covering 4
main topics : The intrinsic characteristic (age, sexe, nationality...), the hygiene
habits, the level of confinement and the skin disorder appeared since February 2020.
Microbiome sequencing
Once we receive the microbiome samples we send them directly to an external company,
Genewiz. They’ll extract bacterial DNA from the samples, amplify the V3-V4 regions of
the 16S RNA gene, and then sequence the amplicons.
Statistical analysis
After having analyzed the composition and diversity of each microbiome we’ll link these
results to the answer to the questionnaire to finally find some correlations between
some microbiome compositions and some characteristics of the lifestyle or some skin
disorder