Dear Colleagues,

Despite the availability of new vaccines and antibacterial agents suppressing microbial pathogens, infectious diseases are among the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. While there are a number of studies dealing with infections in adults (mainly focused on some particular diseases, e.g., tuberculosis) and/or pathogens, less attention has been devoted to the pediatric age. To overcome this deficiency, several international consortia have emerged in the last decade aimed at investigating life-threatening infections affecting childhood.

‘Omic’ sciences are gaining growing attention in parallel with the development of new and cost-effective technologies, but also bioinformatic and mathematical solutions that allow dealing with big data from massive genotyping and sequencing technologies. The field of infectiology is one of the many in biomedicine that is benefiting from these new achievements, and in particular, the area studying host response to infection from different ‘omic’ perspectives, namely, host infectomics. Thus, there is now increasing evidence supporting that it is not only the pathogen that decides how and when to infect the host, but also the biological predisposition of the host to be infected by the pathogen. Most of the genomic studies published to date have focused their attention on genomics, first by exploring a few thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) distributed throughout the whole genome in large case-control samples (e.g., population-based genome-wide association studies; GWAS), and more recently using parallel sequencing procedures (e.g., whole exome sequencing, WES). There are also interesting attempts in the terrain of transcriptomic, using microarrays and more recently RNAseq, to investigate the host genetic expression response to different infections and pathogens.

We invite researchers to contribute original research articles and reviews focused on host infectomics in children. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, etc.;
• Systems biology;
• Studies exploring big data resources and using discovery-based procedures and providing insights on host biomarkers for infections.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Salas
Guest Editor

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