Pathway Modeling and Systems Biology

A particular emphasis of the group is the development of methods for the reconstruction of biological networks (Fröhlich 2007), Fröhlich 2008, Fröhlich 2008). With these it becomes possible to gain insights into the signal flow within a cell, based on the measurement of intervention effects via gene expression data.

Further, we developed a novel approach to assign relevant pathways to gene lists purely based on protein domain annotation (Hahne 2008, Fröhlich 2008), which is increasingly utilized to define gene lists for functional characterization, for example, in the Integrative Cell Biology group.

We are using these network reconstruction methods to gain a deeper insight into the pathways that determine the cellular decisions in cancer. We are further building logical network models to run simulations, that allow us predictions about the behavior of the cell under various conditions.