A Knowledge Model for Analysis and Simulation of Signal Transduction Networks
Our project is set up as a collaboration of three departments of Columbia University
Columbia Genome Center Computer Science Department of Medical Informatics
Authors: Tomohiro Koike, Sergey Kalachikov, Shawn M. Gomez, Michael Krauthammer, Sabina H. Kaplan, Pauline Kra, James J. Russo, Carol Friedman, Andrey Rzhetsky
Ontology: collection of concepts concept definitions relationships among concepts properties of each concept [explicit axioms]
Goal – a Particular Application Problem/Motivation: Currently a search through the PubMed system with the keywords “cell cycle” and “apoptosis” produced lists of 169,293 and 29,961 articles, respectively. Clearly it is not feasible to scan all these papers “manually”...
Outline of the system that we are designing
Basic concepts Action, ActionAgent, Process, Publication, Taxon, Disease, Mechanism, Result, Developmental Stage, MicroStructure, State, MacroStructure, Relation, Similarity, RelationType, and ActionTemplate
We represent a pathway a series of overlapping “links” – substance/action/substance triplets Substance A Substance B Substance C Substance D Representation
ActionAgent
Action and Process
Auxiliary Concepts Publication, Taxon, Structure, Developmental Stage, and Disease encapsulate pieces of auxiliary information about ActionAgents, Processes and Actions
Properties of Concepts: ActionAgent
Properties of Concepts: Action
Duality of actions in signal transduction literature
Dualism: in the biochemical representation substance A is not a participant of the action, while it is in the logical representation Logical Biochemical
We realized that the current research literature in molecular biology Describes pathways on two different levels: Logical and Biochemical
A activates B A inactivates B A phoshorylates B A methylates B... logical biochemical
Both logical and biochemical descriptions can be combined in the same sentence: Activated raf-1 phosphorylates and activates mek-1. logical biochemical
Mechanism and Result of an Action
Mechanism and Result Result LogicalAction Mechanism BiochemicalAction
Converting LogicalAction into BiochemicalAction and back
The paper descibing this ontology will appear in Bioinformatics A. Rzhetsky, T. Koike, S. Kalachikov, S. M. Gomez, M. Krauthammer, S. H. Kaplan, P. Kra, J. J. Russo and C. Friedman, A knowledge model for analysis and simulation of regulatory networks, Bioinformatics, (accepted) (2000).
Implementation: A Pathway Editor Koike, T., and Rzhetsky, A A graphic editor for analyzing signal transduction pathways. Gene (accepted).
Human cell cycle/apoptosis pathways
Small fragment of the same pathway
O snail, climb Mount Fuji with no hurry Issa
Thank you!