The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the hypothesis that a systems biology approach can be developed such that a set of transcription factors, relevant to burn-induced inflammatory response can be identified and modulated to control the host response. We explore a novel method for identifying coherent and informative expression motifs and we subsequently determine conserved transcription factor binding sites for the sub-sets of co-expressed genes. The responses are rationalized in the context of burn-induced inflammation and the putative transcription factors are rationalized in the context of intervention targets for controlling gene expression. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.