The skin, as an immune surveillance organ, is continuously interacting with various infectious agents, such as fungi, bacteria, viruses, and parasites, and is capable of responding with plasticity to pathogens in order to mount an efficient response to control microorganism burden. The final response is a result of the association between the host background and particularities from infectious agents and can be characterized by different effector mechanisms.

Several studies have demonstrated that the skin has essential immune functions and that during infectious processes, active defense mechanisms and tolerogenic pathways are activated. The presence of many specialized immune cells during skin infection, including dendritic cells (DCs), CD4⁺ T helper (Th) cells, CD8⁺ T cells, γδ T cells, natural killer T cells (NKT), as well as innate cells such as macrophages, neutrophils, innate lymphoid cells, mast cells, fibroblasts, and nerve-cell types, suggest that complex interactions may occur in the skin in order to maintain host immune homeostasis.

This Research Topic will focus on recent advances in the understanding of the mechanisms whereby skin cells could contribute to the control and/or the establishment of infection and how local immune responses might modulate the systemic responses against different pathogens. In addition, the capacity of the pathogens to differentially modulate the skin environment and cell phenotype as well as the autocrine and paracrine signaling between skin cells like keratinocytes, Langerhans cells, dendritic cells, macrophages and neutrophils. In particular, we are interested in shedding new light on the skin inflammatory response to infectious agents such as cutaneous mycoses, as well as bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases that primarily or secondarily affect the skin. Contributions covering the role of the skin immune system in containing or spreading these pathogens are of interest.

We welcome authors to submit Original Research, Review, and Mini-Review articles, covering, but not limited to, the following topics:

1. Studies that aim to understand the role of the skin immune system on the evolution of the inflammatory response against infectious agents.

2. New therapeutics, prophylactics or immune biomarkers that might be used for the development of strategies that aim to control or treat skin infectious diseases.

3- The skin immune response to different infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, and helminths, with a special emphasis on leprosis, Staphylococcus spp, Streptococcus spp, herpes virus, varicella-zoster, HPV, larva migrans, sporotrichosis, and leishmaniasis.

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