Green Walls and the Indoor Microbiome

We know that the human microbiome, and therefore human health and well-being, is affected by the environmental microbiome. Urban residents spend on average 80% of their time indoors, in highly engineered environments. In collaboration with the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, we seek to understand whether plant-based bioremediation walls and infrastructure can be optimized to augment the indoor microbiome.

In the era of computational genomics, a great deal of progress has been made in determining the relationships between genetic information and the development of multicellular organisms: plants, animals, humans. But what’s become most clear from this research is that all these organisms owe meaningful aspects of their development and phenotype to interactions with the microorganisms—bacteria or fungi—with which they live in symbiosis. Although it’s far from fully understood, contemporary research can conclude that human health is closely linked to the state of its microbiome. We also know that the human microbiome is affected by the environmental microbiome.