Team:Paris Bettencourt/Contribution

Quaranskin
Introduction

Intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the composition and distribution of the skin microbiome. The skin is always exposed to the external environment, intrinsic host factors along with extrinsic factors such as climate and habitat have a great influence on the microbial flora that colonize the skin. To effectively implement our goal of developing Staphylococcus epidermidis as a chassis for synthetic biology of the skin microbiome, it was essential to explore the growth of our target organism.

In particular, our team chose to probe the growth kinetics of Staphylococcus epidermidis with respect to change in Temperature, pH and Salinity, the three parameters that we expect to fluctuate on the skin in response to different environmental or physiological cues. We reasoned that to gain such insights will be relevant to formulating a synthetic probiotic.

Additionally, we were intrigued by the question if there would be any change in the growth kinetics in 2D vs 3D environments. To explore further we decided to build a skin model (mention the general idea, material, used, method/machine/protocol, how we were planning to grow the organism,etc…...). This is an ongoing part of this project.