The Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology (CSSB) brings together UT researchers across a range of disciplines to quantitatively understand and engineer the regulatory networks underlying organismal biology.

Our research interests include:

• Disease: Developing computer models to better understand a multitude of human diseases and crop traits.
• Drugs: Discovering drugs based on genetic modules shared between humans and organisms as distant as yeast.
• Developing diagnostics for resource-limited settings using smart molecular amplifiers.
• Immunity: Using cutting-edge genome sequence technology to map immune responses.
• Emerging viruses: Finding methods to predict the emergence of the next threats.
• Molecular computation:  Developing programmable molecules that contribute to sensors, amplifiers, and organismal operating systems.

Research at the CSSB is focused on the integration of genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics data—offering a more unified view of organisms as integrated networks. Such systems-wide, interdisciplinary approaches allow us to better define the functions of genes, and to accelerate the discovery of new pathways that are critical for various traits and diseases.

Selected projects include: Diagnostics for Developing Markets. Discovering New Disease Genes, Pathways, and Drugs.

HIV/AIDS: An Ongoing Global Pandemic. Two of their contributions to this field are already being translated to public health:

• Development of a synthetic gene that protects against HIV, which is now under therapeutic development for the treatment of AIDS.
• Identification of new genes in the human genome that may help define disease progression. These genes are currently part of a large, ongoing HIV/AIDS association study being conducted using HIV/AIDS cohorts.

Emerging Disease: We are currently focusing on influenza, arenaviruses, and Dengue. We are interested in the host genes that make certain species and individuals more prone to infection by these and other viruses.