Abstract
Urbanization is a key global trend. Despite its many advantages, urban life presents significant challenges to human health, potentially disrupting the delicate balance of the human microbiome. Given its pivotal role in preventing local infections and inflammatory diseases, it is crucial to understand the effects of urbanization on the skin microbiome. Therefore, this innovative project aims to investigate urban factors or combinations thereof that impact the skin microbiome composition, and identify potentially beneficial skin bacteria resistant to these urban factors. To address this challenge, we will use comprehensive skin microbiome and metadata from several microbiome projects, which we will combine with public environmental data to obtain groundbreaking insights. Furthermore, we will establish innovative in vitro microbial-based testing platforms suitable to represent children or adults. This will enable us to experimentally validate the impacts of urban-associated factors on the skin microbiome to substantiate the observed microbiome study associations, which has seldom been done in the past. As a final innovative aim, we will identify and characterize beneficial skin microorganisms that mitigate the negative effects of harmful urban factors on the skin. These novel insights will be critical for the advancement of skin disease prevention strategies and promoting overall human health in urban environments.
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