Section edited by Christina Chan
This section covers the analysis and modeling of complex systems to better understand humans and animal biology, in particular with regard to human health and disease.
Section edited by Christina Chan
This section covers the analysis and modeling of complex systems to better understand humans and animal biology, in particular with regard to human health and disease.
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As today, there are hundreds of targeted therapies for the treatment of cancer, many of which have companion biomarkers that are in use to inform treatment decisions. If we would consider this whole arsenal of...
Abnormal synchronization of brain oscillations is found to be associated with various core symptoms of schizophrenia. However, the underlying mechanism of this association remains yet to be elucidated.
Cancer is a complex disease where molecular mechanism remains elusive. A systems approach is needed to integrate diverse biological information for the prognosis and therapy risk assessment using mechanistic a...
Population transmission models of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use simplistic assumptions – typically constant, homogeneous rates – to represent the short-term risk and long...
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is among the most common human systemic autoimmune diseases, affecting approximately 1% of the population worldwide. To date, there is no cure for the disease and current treatments s...
Palmitic acid, the most common saturated free fatty acid, has been implicated in ER (endoplasmic reticulum) stress-mediated apoptosis. This lipoapotosis is dependent, in part, on the upregulation of the activa...
When mathematical modelling is applied to many different application areas, a common task is the estimation of states and parameters based on measurements. With this kind of inference making, uncertainties in ...
Lineage specific differentiation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) is largely mediated by specific growth factors and extracellular matrix molecules. Growth factors initiate a cascade of signals which cont...
Torcetrapib, a cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitor which raises high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and reduces low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol level, has been documented to in...
5-lipoxygenase (5-LO) is a key enzyme in the synthesis of leukotrienes and 5-Oxo-6E,8Z,11Z,14Z-eicosatetraenoic acid (oxoETE). These inflammatory signaling molecules play a role in the pathology of asthma and ...
Estrogen receptors alpha (ER) are implicated in many types of female cancers, and are the common target for anti-cancer therapy using selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs, such as tamoxifen). However,...
Estrogen therapy has positively impact the treatment of several cancers, such as prostate, lung and breast cancers. Moreover, several groups have reported the importance of estrogen induced gene regulation in ...
The activation of immune cells in the brain is believed to be one of the earliest events in prion disease development, where misfolded PrionSc protein deposits are thought to act as irritants leading to a seri...
Global demographic changes have stimulated marked interest in the process of aging. There has been, and will continue to be, an unrelenting rise in the number of the oldest old ( >85 years of age). Together wi...
The genome is continuously attacked by a variety of agents that cause DNA damage. Recognition of DNA lesions activates the cellular DNA damage response (DDR), which comprises a network of signal transduction p...
The search for new drug targets for antibiotics against Plasmodium falciparum, a major cause of human deaths, is a pressing scientific issue, as multiple resistance strains spread rapidly. Metabolic network-based...
Annually, influenza A viruses circulate the world causing wide-spread sickness, economic loss, and death. One way to better defend against influenza virus-induced disease may be to develop novel host-based the...
In the field of drug discovery, assessing the potential of multidrug therapies isa difficult task because of the combinatorial complexity (both theoretical andexperimental) and because of the requirements on t...
Availability of oxygen and nutrients in the coronary circulation is a crucial determinant of cardiac performance. Nutrient composition of coronary blood may significantly vary in specific physiological and pat...
The use of biological molecular network information for diagnostic and prognostic purposes and elucidation of molecular disease mechanism is a key objective in systems biomedicine. The network of regulatory mi...
Extracellular feedback is an abundant module of intercellular communication networks, yet a detailed understanding of its role is still lacking. Here, we study interactions between polyclonal activated T cells...
Embryonic stem cells (ESC) have the capacity to self-renew and remain pluripotent, while continuously providing a source of a variety of differentiated cell types. Understanding what governs these properties a...
In this study we explored preeclampsia through a bioinformatics approach. We create a comprehensive genes/proteins dataset by the analysis of both public proteomic data and text mining of public scientific lit...
Colon crypts, a single sheet of epithelia cells, consist of a periodic pattern of stem cells, transit-amplifying cells, and terminally differentiated cells that constantly renew and turnover. Experimental evid...
The process of drug discovery and development is time-consuming and costly, and the probability of success is low. Therefore, there is rising interest in repositioning existing drugs for new medical indication...
Proteolytic breakdown of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) by secretases is a complex cellular process that results in formation of neurotoxic Aβ peptides, causative of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disea...
As protein-protein interactions connect proteins that participate in either the same or different functions, networks of interacting and functionally annotated proteins can be converted into process graphs of ...
Integrating gene expression profiles and metabolic pathways under different experimental conditions is essential for understanding the coherence of these two layers of cellular organization. The network charac...
The physical periphery of a biological cell is mainly described by signaling pathways which are triggered by transmembrane proteins and receptors that are sentinels to control the whole gene regulatory network...
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most lethal cancers worldwide, and the mechanisms that lead to the disease are still relatively unclear. However, with the development of high-throughput technologi...
Understanding the information-processing capabilities of signal transduction networks, how those networks are disrupted in disease, and rationally designing therapies to manipulate diseased states require syst...
Systems biology holds promise as a new approach to drug target identification and drug discovery against neglected tropical diseases. Genome-scale metabolic reconstructions, assembled from annotated genomes an...
Expression of the two transcription factors microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) are tightly connected to cell proliferation and ...
Ovarian cancer causes more deaths than any other gynecological cancer. Identifying the molecular mechanisms that drive disease progress in ovarian cancer is a critical step in providing therapeutics, improving...
Toxins A and B (TcdA and TcdB) are Clostridium difficile's principal virulence factors, yet the pathways by which they lead to inflammation and severe diarrhea remain unclear. Also, the relative role of either to...
During respiratory viral infections host injury occurs due in part to inappropriate host responses. In this study we sought to uncover the host transcriptional responses underlying differences between high- an...
Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) is an autosomal dominant disease with a varying range of phenotypes involving abnormal vasculature primarily manifested as arteriovenous malformations in various org...
Nutritional systems biology offers the potential for comprehensive predictions that account for all metabolic changes with the intricate biological organization and the multitudinous interactions between the c...
Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a potent regulator of angiogenesis, and its role in cancer biology has been widely studied. Many cancer therapies target angiogenesis, with a focus being on VEGF-me...
Cancer cells harbor a large number of molecular alterations such as mutations, amplifications and deletions on DNA sequences and epigenetic changes on DNA methylations. These aberrations may dysregulate gene e...
Hemostasis is a critical and active function of the blood mediated by platelets. Therefore, the prevention of pathological platelet aggregation is of great importance as well as of pharmaceutical and medical i...
Humans and other organisms are equipped with a set of responses that can prevent damage from exposure to a multitude of endogenous and environmental stressors. If these stress responses are overwhelmed, this c...
One of the major goals in gene and protein expression profiling of cancer is to identify biomarkers and build classification models for prediction of disease prognosis or treatment response. Many traditional s...
As an important epigenetic modification, DNA methylation plays a crucial role in the development of mammals and in the occurrence of complex diseases. Genes that interact directly or indirectly may have the sa...
Neural stem cells offer potential treatment for neurodegenerative disorders, such like Alzheimer's disease (AD). While much progress has been made in understanding neural stem cell function, a precise descript...
Ciliary dysfunction leads to a number of human pathologies, including primary ciliary dyskinesia, nephronophthisis, situs inversus pathology or infertility. The mechanism of cilia beating regulation is complex...
Complex phenotypes such as insulin resistance involve different biological pathways that may interact and influence each other. Interpretation of related experimental data would be facilitated by identifying r...
Successful drug development has been hampered by a limited understanding of how to translate laboratory-based biological discoveries into safe and effective medicines. We have developed a generic method for pr...
One of the primary objectives in cancer research is to identify causal genomic alterations, such as somatic copy number variation (CNV) and somatic mutations, during tumor development. Many valuable studies la...
Waves propagating in "excitable media" is a reliable way to transmit signals in space. A fascinating example where living cells comprise such a medium is Dictyostelium D. which propagates waves of chemoattract...