Difference between revisions of "Team:Paris Bettencourt/Description"

Description

The human microbiome can be defined as the complement of micro-organisms that reside in or on the human body in a symbiotic relationship. These microorganisms span all three domains of life, which typically interact with the human host in commensal or mutualistic manners. Our project is focusing on the human skin microbiome.

On the first hand we are aiming to explore the skin microbiome, on the other hand we want to develop tools to engineer it.

Our first project, Quaranskin, is the study of the microbiome of European people in this unprecedented context of COVID-19 pandemia. Indeed we think that the whole sanitary measure set up in almost all european countries since February 2020 until now, October 2020, could have a real impact on the composition of our skin microbiome. Since we know that the skin microbiome has a direct impact on health, we can think that these changements in our way of life could indirectly affect our health. It is to answer these questions and also because the confinement represents a unique opportunity to study the microbiome under these original conditions, that we decided to set up the Quaranskin study. This project consists in collecting skin microbiome samples from 70 European participants, then extracting bacterial DNA and séquencing the v3-v4 region of the 16S gene in order to know the composition in bacterial species of these microbiome samples. In parallele the participants are asked to answer a question which covers 4 main topics : The intrasic caracteristique (age, sexe, nationality...), the hygiene habits, the level of confinement and the skin disorder appeared since February 2020. In addition to proposing an open database of skin microbiome of european people in this unique contexte, the final aim of this study is to find some correlation between some microbiome compositions and some characteristics of the lifestyle or some skin disorder

After observing the microbiome we would like to engineer it in order to propose some therapeutics solution. We focus our research on a commensal bacterium of the skin microbiome : Staphylococcus epidermidis. This bacteria hasn’t been used in Synthetic biology before, therefore no tools are currently available to use it as a chassis. This is the reason why we wanted to develop a MoClo toolkit for S. epidermidis, EpiFlex. As proof of concept of EpiFlex we assemble a plasmid containing the mCherry transcriptional unit using our developed toolkit, to then use it to transform S. epidermidis and make it glow in red, here is born the EpiGlow project! In parallèle, a third project, EpiGrow, has been set up in order to optimize the transformation and culture protocols for S. epidermidis. Also we want to compare the 3D and 2D culture growth of this bacteria by developing a 2D model of skin and a device to measure 2D growth.

These three projects together will allow us to present S. epidermidis as a good chassis for synthetic biology and thereafter to use it to fight against skin microbiome disequilibrium which leads to some skin diseases such as Atopic dermatitis.