Application: Biological Pathway Discovery

Abstract

In this chapter, we attempt to apply our service mining framework to the discovery of biological pathways. In Section 3.6, we introduced various entities inside a eukaryotic cell, as shown in Figure 3.7. These entities all have attributes and behaviors. The behaviors are manifested through entities’ interactions with one another and the surrounding environment. Such interactions are the foundations for many of the pathways that are essential to the well being of our body. A biological pathway is a series of molecular interactions and reactions [18]. Biological pathways have traditionally been discovered manually based on experimental data such as gene expression data from microarrays, protein-protein interaction data from large-scale screening, and pathway data from previous discoveries. As a whole, biological pathways form the bridges that link much of the diverse range of biological data into a logical picture of why and how human genes and cells function the way they do. Disturbances and alterations in many of these pathways are also expected to be linked to various diseases.