Meeting Report
Karolinska Dermatology Symposium, 2017“ The Microbiome in Health and Disease – Focus on SKIN”
Hanna Brauner, MD, PhD Dermatology Unit, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: hanna. brauner @ sll. se
Introduction
Photo: John Sennett
The Karolinska Dermatology Symposium is a longstanding yearly tradition in our department. This year the theme was“ The microbiome in health and disease – focus on SKIN”, highlighting the recent understanding of the expanded role of bacteria, viruses and funghi in health and disease. The symposium gathered more than 100 dermatologists and skin researchers from all over Sweden. This year the symposium was generously sponsored by Novartis.
Professor Mona Ståhle and Associate Professors Maria Bradley and Liv Eidsmo, Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, greeted everyone welcome and introduced the exciting field of the disease modulatory effects excerted by our microbiome. The microbiome is currently attracting much attention in the pathophysiology of the gut, or“ interior skin”. In dermatology we are just in the beginning of unravelling its impact on the skin, which warrants for an exciting future development.
The Karolinska Dermatology Symposium 2017 spanned from the role of commensals in skin biology and the effect of skin microbiome on odor to fecal transplantations and cutting edge genetic methods to study microbiota.
Human microbiome in health and disease Staffan Normark, Senior Professor, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm
Professor Normark made an elegant in troduction to the field. He described how humans have co-evolved with microbial partners and reminded that we have much more microorganisms in our body than our own cells. Since we are unable to culture many of these microorganisms the development of deep
Fig. 1. Topographical distribution of bacteria on skin sites. The family-level classification of bacteria colonizing an individual subject is shown, with the phyla in bold. The sites selected were those that show a predilection for skin bacterial infections and are grouped as sebaceous or oily( blue circles), moist( typically skin creases)( green circles) and dry, flat surfaces( red circles). From Grice EA, Segre JA, Nat Rev Microbiol, 2011. Permission has been obtained by...
sequencing technologies has been instrumental to advance our understanding of the complexity of the microbiota in our bodies.
It is now clear that the diversity of the human microbiome varies between individuals and is strongly influenced by the microbial habitat such as the skin, the oral cavity, the nose and the gastrointestinal tract. The microbiome is also different at different sites within the same tissue, for example there is a
54 Forum for Nord Derm Ven 2017, Vol. 22, No. 2