“The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts.” – Aristotle

The Department of Systems and Computational Biology (DoSCB) (erstwhile Virtual Centre for Systems Biology) is the fifth department in the School of Life Sciences. It was established as per the statute 17(5)(a)&(b) of University of Hyderabad based on a resolution passed by its Executive Council on 30th September 2018.

Currently, the department is offering a 5 year Integrated Master’s course in Systems Biology (IntMSc(Syst Biol)). This is offered in conjunction with College of Integrated Studies (CIS), University of Hyderabad. This course encompasses an interdisciplinary approach that is developed with changing nature of current biological research, wherein students are trained in analyzing complex molecular systems and high-throughput biological data. Many of the students of IntMSc(Syst Biol) are either placed in biologicals/pharma companies or pursuing their PhDs and beyond in the University of Hyderabad or other universities and research institutes in India and abroad.

The faculty from this department are involved in teaching Genomics, Computational Biology, Mathematics & Statistics and Systems Biology courses to not only IntMSc(Syst Biol) but also to the students of MSc. (Biotechnology) and MTech (Bioinformatics) from the sister departments. In a symbiont manner, the sister departments of School of Life Sciences and other science schools have also been offering other courses that span core biology courses, computational neurobiology, statistcal physics, machine learning & data analytics to the students of IntMSc (Syst Biol)).

The current research interests of the faculty in the department are in the topical diverse areas of Systems and Computational biology, and selected ones are listed below:

• Biological networks


• Spatio-temporal dynamics of protein-protein interaction networks in human health and disease conditions.


• Disease Informatics & Biomarker discovery


• Prediction and modelling of disease causing mutations in human proteins.
• Organic volatiles (detectable in urine and saliva samples) based biomarker discovery for human communicable and non-communicable diseases.
• Identification of potential prognostic signature for predicting survival in cancers.


• Protein evolution, structure and interactions


• Evolution, Conformational landscape and functions of intrinsically disordered regions in proteins.


• Non-coding RNA biology


• Identification and characterization of novel long non-coding RNAs.


• Metagenomics


• Metagenome analysis of gut and root microbiota in healthy and disease conditions and also of soil bacteria found near industrial effluent treatment plants.


• Integration of high-throughput data


• Integration of various ‘omics’ data for gene knowledge mining and improvement of genome annotation.

The faculty members, in the past, have been the recipients of grants from the national agencies such as CSIR, DST, DBT etc., and have been part of long term national and international collaborative research grants (in collaboration with Rostock Medical Centre, Germany and University of Madeira. Portugal). Currently the department has received research support from INNO INDIGO- DST and DBT-Ramalingasami grant.

The department is poised to grow rapidly and is optimistically looking forward to get associated with eminent professors/scientists at various stages of their career.