A Systems Biomedicine Approach Towards Modelling the MAP Kinase Pathways.

Karthik Kalyan, Haffkine Institute and MAP Kinase Resource, Mumbai, India

Systems Biology is the study of interactions between various components of biological systems, and how these interactions give rise to the function and behavior of that particular system. While systems biomedicine is the application of systems biology at a multi-scale level spanning different spatial and temporal scales or at multi-level hierarchical nature of the model. One such example includes the down stream responses within MAP Kinase signalling pathways within a cell and how it could play a role in either cell division or in cancer. Computational approaches such as Differential Equation based (DEB) approaches can be used model the role of MAP Kinase signalling pathways at various spatial and temporal scales. But the disadvantages of DEB include lack of dynamism; minute changes in parameter values could result in major changes in expected emergent properties etc. In order to overcome the disadvantages of tradition computational approaches such as DBE approaches, Individual based modeling approaches also termed as the agent based modeling approaches/agent based systems (A bottom-up modeling paradigm) could be utilised to model the MAP Kinase signalling pathways at a multi-scale level and software agents are used to represent such systems. Here, the individual software agent is considered to be a natural ontology to represent the MAP Kinase signalling systems and their interactions incorporating various levels of scales relating to time and space. Understanding the operation of such complex interactions spanning various temporal and spatial scale levels is essential for controlling several chronic inflammatory diseases such as cancer.