Welcome to Tissue Barriers

On behalf of the Editorial Board, I am pleased to welcome you to the new Landes Bioscience journal, Tissue Barriers. This is the first cross-disciplinary journal dedicated to the architecture, biological roles, regulation and dysfunctions of tissue barriers and intercellular junctions. We are launching our journal in a very exciting time. The tissue barrier research field is rapidly growing and several thousand papers on the subject are being published each year. However, it is not a big secret that the tissue barrier research community lacks cohesion. Indeed, researchers studying epithelial barriers and junctions do not frequently communicate with their colleagues tackling similar scientific problems in the vascular endothelium. Even in the epithelial barriers field, scientists tend to gravitate into “tissue-centric” clusters narrowly focusing on the barriers of the gut, lungs, skin and reproductive systems. Additionally, there are large autonomous cohorts of researchers working with invertebrate models of epithelial morphogenesis, studying drug delivery or examining immune cells and pathogen interactions with epithelial and endothelial layers. The primary mission of our new journal is to break the barriers and bridge the gaps in the tissue barrier research field. We are seeking to create a forum for sharing discoveries and exchanging ideas between experts in basic developmental and cell biology, physiology, pharmacology, structural biology, bioengineering and clinical medicine. We will be happy to publish scientificallysound speculations and debates on controversial subjects in the Welcome to Tissue Barriers