Figure 2

Targeting the MAPK signaling pathway. (A) The MAPK pathway communicates with 90 other pathways from the cancer type A network, including crosstalk with Focal Adhesion. (B) MAPK and Focal Adhesion crosstalk is basically the outcome of the sub-network of all correlated genes included in at least one of these two pathways. (C) Although all of these genes function as part of the MAPK pathway, they may have different effects on MAPK connectivity, since each gene correlates with different genes and pathways. Measuring the impact of each gene by the number of the resulting significant edges could give us a way to predict the gene’s involvement and intensity related to MAPK connectivity. For instance, FGFR3 is included in 5 pathways and on average is connected with 15% genes per pathway edge. The deletion of FGFR3 changes the number of pathways that crosstalk with the MAPK pathway, from the initial 90 crosstalks to 87 crosstalks.