Biological barriers are essential for health, protecting tissues from harmful microbes while allowing nutrients to pass. These barriers exist across life, from the lining of the human gut to protective layers in plants. When these barriers fail, they contribute to diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, infection, and immune disorders. Despite their importance, we still lack a clear understanding of how biological barriers are built, repaired, and maintained. This project uses plants as powerful models to study how living systems create strong, self-healing barriers in the presence of complex microbial communities. By combining microbiology, genetic engineering, and computational modeling, we aim to uncover universal biological design principles that govern barrier strength and resilience. These discoveries will inform new strategies for strengthening epithelial barriers in humans, promoting tissue repair, restoring healthy microbial communities, and preventing disease.

This interdisciplinary project brings together expertise in plant biology, microbial ecology, and bioengineering to develop new experimental tools for probing how microbes and host tissues work together to shape barrier function. By engineering plant systems with programmable genetic circuits and carefully designed microbial communities, we will gain unprecedented control over barrier formation, repair, and permeability. These approaches allow us to systematically test how specific bacteria and host genes influence barrier health, generating insights that are difficult or impossible to obtain in animal models. Together, this work will establish a new cross-kingdom framework for understanding biological barriers, accelerating discovery in microbiome science and guiding the development of novel strategies to strengthen epithelial defenses and promote human health.