Experimental and computational methods for the analysis and modeling of signaling networks

Abstract

External cues are processed and integrated by signal transduction networks that drive appropriate cellular responses. Characterizing these programs, as well as how their deregulation leads to disease, is crucial for our understanding of cell biology. The past ten years have witnessed a gradual increase in the number of molecular parameters that can be simultaneously measured in a sample. Moreover our capacity to handle multiple samples in parallel has expanded, thus allowing a deeper profiling of cellular states under diverse experimental conditions. These technological advances have been complemented by the development of computational methods aimed at mining, analyzing and modeling these data. In this review we give a general overview of the most important experimental and computational techniques used in the field and describe several interesting application of these methodologies. We conclude by highlighting the issues that we think will keep researchers in the field busy in the next few years.