Microbiome-associated disorders, including immune and inflammatory diseases, infection, cancer, and metabolic syndromes, are increasing globally. Existing therapeutic strategies remain inadequate to address the complexity and interindividual variability of the microbiota. Our goal is to harness the remarkable chemical diversity of dietary and medicinal plants to uncover how their bioactive metabolites mechanistically shape microbial communities, and in turn, influence host health and disease.

Our research group will integrate techniques in plant synthetic biology, high-throughput microbial screening, and chemical genomics to generate mechanistic, systems-level frameworks for how botanicals shape diverse microbe-host symbioses in health and disease.

Using these systems, we will investigate mechanism via three complementary breadths:

1)   Deciphering the chemical interplay of complex botanical formulations in health and disease

2)   Mapping strain-level mechanism of botanicals across diverse microbe-host ecosystems

3)   Engineering plant biosynthesis towards new-to-nature, bioactive botanical natural products