Expression of Virulence Factors in Atopic Dermatitis

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a skin inflammatory disease in which the opportunistic pathogen is prevalent and abundant. harbors several secreted virulence factors that have well-studied functions in infection models, but it is unclear whether these extracellular microbial factors are relevant in the context of AD. To address this question, we designed a culture-independent method to detect and quantify virulence factors expressed at the skin sites. We utilized RNase-H‒dependent multiplex PCR for preamplification of reverse-transcribed RNA extracted from tape strips of patients with AD sampled at skin sites with differing severity and assessed the expression of a panel of virulence factors using qPCR. We observed an increase in viable abundance on sites with increased severity of disease, and many virulence factors were expressed at the AD skin sites. Surprisingly, we did not observe any significant upregulation of the virulence factors at the lesional sites compared with those at the nonlesional control. Overall, we utilized a robust assay to directly detect and quantify viable and its associated virulence factors at the site of AD skin lesions. This method can be extended to study the expression of skin microbial genes at the sites of various dermatological conditions.