Kleppe R, Kjarland E, Selheim F
Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen, Jonas Lies vei 91, 5009 Bergen, Norway.
Curr Pharm Biotechnol. 2006 Jun;7(3):135-45. doi: 10.2174/138920106777549722.
Cellular signaling lies at the core of cellular behavior, and is central for the understanding of many pathologic conditions. To comprehend how signal transduction is orchestrated at the molecular level remains the ultimate challenge for cell biology. In the last years there has been a revolution in the development of high-throughput methodologies in proteomics and genomics, which have provided extensive knowledge about expression profiles and molecular interaction-networks. However, these methods have typically provided qualitative and static information. This is about to turn, and several high-throughput methods are now available that provide quantitative and temporal information. These data are well suited for analysis by computational methods and bioinformatics, which are becoming increasingly valuable tools to grasp the complexity of cellular networks. At present, several cellular pathways have been modeled in silico and the analysis provides new understanding of the underlying properties that contribute to their dynamic features. Here, we review methodologies that are used for in silico modeling as well as methods to obtain large-scale quantitative data, and discuss how they can be integrated to generate powerful and predictive models of cellular processes. We argue that the generation of such models provide powerful tools to understand how systems properties emerges in healthy and pathologic states, and to generate efficient strategies for pharmacological intervention.
细胞信号传导是细胞行为的核心,对于理解许多病理状况至关重要。理解信号转导如何在分子水平上被精心编排仍然是细胞生物学的终极挑战。在过去几年中,蛋白质组学和基因组学的高通量方法有了革命性的发展,这些方法提供了关于表达谱和分子相互作用网络的广泛知识。然而,这些方法通常提供的是定性和静态信息。这种情况即将改变,现在有几种高通量方法可以提供定量和时间信息。这些数据非常适合通过计算方法和生物信息学进行分析,而计算方法和生物信息学正成为理解细胞网络复杂性越来越有价值的工具。目前,已经在计算机上对几种细胞途径进行了建模,分析为理解有助于其动态特征的潜在特性提供了新的认识。在这里,我们回顾用于计算机建模的方法以及获取大规模定量数据的方法,并讨论如何将它们整合以生成细胞过程的强大且具有预测性的模型。我们认为,生成这样的模型为理解系统特性如何在健康和病理状态下出现以及为药物干预生成有效策略提供了强大的工具。