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Welcome to The Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at UTSW

Established in 2011, the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense is located in the Simmons Biomedical Building on the North Campus of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. The Center occupies 15,000 square feet of research laboratory space and currently employs 13 faculty, 6 post-doctoral researchers, 2 research fellows, 3 graduate students, and 3 students/interns. Their research is aided by 44 support staff organized in six teams: the Animal Breeding Team, CRISPR Targeting/Transgenic/Microinjection Team, DNA Sequencing Team, Bioinformatics/Computation Team, Phenotypic Screening Team, and Administrative Team. Mice are housed in the Center’s Vivarium.

The Center has developed a unique method for instantly identifying induced point mutations that cause phenotypes in mice, and has applied this method on a large scale, so far damaging or destroying over one third of all genes in the mouse genome while carefully analyzing the phenotypic consequences of this damage. Since 2014, the Center’s success in identifying new phenotypes and their causes has exceed the combined efforts of all other mutagenesis centers in the world. The Center has created and freely shared nearly half a million induced mutations that affect coding sense. Indeed, the great majority of induced mouse germline mutations available for scientific use originated in the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense.


Click below to take a virtual tour of the lab of Bruce Beutler in the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense produced by the Nobel Labs 360°.