Fig. 1.

Systems biology: a tool for charting the antiviral landscape. Systems biology can be employed to unravel the antiviral response at the organism (A), tissue (B), and cellular (C) levels of complexity. At the organism level (A), viral infection of a panel of collaborative cross mice probes the influence of genetic diversity on antiviral responses, identifying correlates of disease severity and improved small animal infection models. At both the tissue (B) and cellular levels (C), systems biology approaches can be utilized to uncover novel aspects of the host antiviral response through an iterative process of experimentation and computational modeling. Finally, emerging breakthroughs in single cell transcriptomics (C) can differentiate between infected and bystander cells, uncovering previously overlooked cell-specific differences in the antiviral response.