Zeitschrift für Informatik und Systembiologie

Integration of Pro-Apoptosis and Pro-Survival Signalling Pathways: A Useful Approach to In silico Biomedical Research

Abstract

Maura Cárdenas-García and Pedro Pablo González-Pérez

Cells communication is absolutely essential for multi-cellular organisms, but what if a cell fails to send out a signal at the proper time? Or what if a signal doesn’t reach its target? What if a target cell does not respond to a signal or a cell responds even though it has not received a signal? These cellular phenomena can lead to serious metabolic alterations, but of course there are molecules that block these errors and prevent a catastrophe. Apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, is a genetically regulated cell-suicide mechanism that is essential for our well-being. In this process, cells acquire the means of their own destruction in the form of an arsenal of deadly proteins, which they turn upon themselves. There are different pathways pro-apoptotic and pro-survival that crosstalk. In this work, we simulated the incremental integration of pro-apoptotic and pro-survival signalling pathways in a tuple spacebased bioinformatics platform, which provides a robust working environment for in silico experimentation, allowing us to work both separately and together on these pathways, including/removing deadly or regulatory proteins, and observing the consequences of such changes for the overall system behaviour.