Understanding the nature of signaling pathways — networks of molecules in a cell that work together to control a cell’s response to its environment — is an increasingly important part of biomedical research and helpful, for example, in enhancing our understanding of how cancer cells live or die.
In a paper, Pathways on demand: automated reconstruction of human signaling networks, published in Systems Biology and Applications, a Nature partner journal, T. M. Murali, professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with Shiv Kale, a research scientist at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, present a new computational algorithm called PathLinker that automatically reconstructs signaling pathways from a background network of molecular interactions.
