National Cancer Institute
Signal transduction pathways are communication routes for transmitting information between cells and within cells. Simply put, these pathways are like electrical circuits made from molecules, which deliver signals that drive decisions about whether cells will proliferate or die; whether they will invade surrounding normal tissue; whether new blood vessels will grow into the tumor to bring essential oxygen and nutrients; and whether cells will travel to other sites in the body. NCI is exploring two areas of interest in this field: cross talk and termination of signaling.
Cross talk, in which a signal jumps from one pathway to another, permits more finely tuned regulation of cell activity than do individual, independent pathways. However, inappropriate cross talk can cause messages to be misinterpreted or not delivered.
After a signaling process has been initiated and the information has been transduced, or transferred, to affect cellular processes, the specific signaling processes must be terminated. Without such termination, cells lose their responsiveness to new signals. Signaling processes that fail to properly terminate can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and the possibility of cancer.
In order to better understand the importance of controlling and regulating complex signaling pathways, NCI’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid program, better known as caBIG®, is developing a tool called Biological Pathway Exchange as a data standard for the modeling of biological pathways. This tool should be of great value to scientists in the field of proteomics, where signaling pathways are key to understanding how proteins talk to each other.
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