Network Analysis of Cell Signaling

17 October 2005

Nancy Gough

Two recent articles describe results on cell signaling that were obtained through the analysis of medium- and large-scale cellular networks. Ma'ayan et al. in Science describe the analysis of a network based on a survey of the literature for signaling in mammalian hippocampal neurons. Stelzl et al. in Cell analyzed a network based on interacting proteins of the human proteome. Both groups used graph theory methods to analyze the properties of the networks and Stelzl et al. identified new participants in the Wnt pathway.

A. Ma'ayan, S. L. Jenkins, S. Neves, A. Hasseldine, E. Grace, B. Dubin-Thaler, N. J. Eungdamrong, G. Weng, P. T. Ram, J. J. Rice, A. Kershenbaum, G. A. Stolovitzky, R. D. Blitzer, R. Iyengar, Formation of regulatory patterns during signal propagation in a mammalian cellular network. Science 309, 1078-1083 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text] [Editors' Choice summary]

U. Stelzl, U. Worm, M. Lalowski, C. Haenig, F. H. Brembeck, H. Goehler, M. Stroedicke, M. Zenkner, A. Schoenherr, S. Koeppen, J. Timm, S. Mintzlaff, C. Abraham, N. Bock, S. Kietzmann, A. Goedde, E. Toksöz, A. Droege, S. Krobitsch, B. Korn, W. Birchmeier, H. Lehrach, E. E. Wanker, A human protein-protein interaction network: A resource for annotating the proteome. Cell 122, 957-968 (2005). [PubMed] [Editors' Choice summary]