UC San Diego

Depicting biochemical relationships and predicting their consequences is an important facet of systems biology and pharmacology research. In particular, the ability to model the effects of small molecular binders in cell signaling pathways would be a useful as a tool to predict the effects of drugs or drug candidates. PathInsight is a new Cytoscape tool whose aim is to simplify pathway complexity and provide a new method with which to model and analyze biological pathways. It models the effects of a molecular binder, such as a drug or naturally occurring protein ligand, downstream a pathway and annotates the affected proteins or genes with simple visuals indicating whether the downstream product has been activated, inhibited, or unaffected. Additionally, PathInsight includes support for Systems Biology Graphical Notation, further aiding in the comprehensibility of biological pathways.