Dr. Sobral's PathoSystems Biology Group focuses on understanding and reverse engineering host-pathogen-environment interactions. Host-pathogen-environment interactions, sometimes called "the disease triangle" provide interesting biological features for an understanding of evolutionary and developmental processes of a very diverse array of organisms. When pathogens and hosts come into contact in a specific environment, they display complex and interwoven communication strategies and through this perturb the genetic, regulatory and biochemical networks of each other. Dissecting and understanding such interactions requires an integration of reductionist molecular data and approaches as well as an integrated and comparative view of the interaction.