NARILIS skin research featured on the March 2025 cover of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology

Bastien Tirtiaux’s doctoral research, supervised by Prof. Yves Poumay and Dr. Catherine Lambert de Rouvroit (UNamur, URPhyM), focuses on Malassezia, commensal yeasts that colonize sebum-rich areas of the human skin. While usually harmless, these yeasts are linked to various skin disorders. Malassezia switch from their commensal round or oval shape to filamentous hyphae, which invade the epidermis, causing barrier disruption and triggering inflammation.

To explore this commensal-to-pathogen shift, Bastien developed a Malassezia infection model on reconstructed human epidermis. His work revealed that some Malassezia furfur strains produce hyphae and invade the cornified layer, while others do not, highlighting hyphae as a key virulence factor. Interestingly, variations in invasiveness among hyphae-producing strains suggest that additional fungal factors may contribute to pathogenicity.

These findings were recently published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology (Bastien et al., 2025). Moreover, Bastien’s scanning electron microscopy image, showing M. furfur hyphae invading reconstructed human epidermis four days post-infection, was selected for the journal’s cover!

Discover also the video animating the JID cover.

With the support of the Electron microscopy platform of the UNamur.