Approach

Because of the inherent nature of biological signaling systems, it has been difficult to find an approach that adequately represents the competitive and systemic dynamics of a pathway or group of pathways - even when we have good empirical data about the underlying drivers of the complexity.

Cellucidate is a new approach to cell signaling that addresses this issue. Mechanistic facts about molecular interactions can be created, accessed and managed using an intuitive interface. A collection of these empirical or hypothetical rules constitutes a well-defined, transparent model that can be executed and analyzed, and that is easy to create, update or modify.

Within this collaborative workspace, researchers can choose to share their work with other users, as well as draw on the prior contributions of the community. This allows users to represent their view of a particular system by adapting an existing version, rather than having to start from scratch.

The decision to share work rests with the individual scientist, however Cellucidate provides a number of public, curated libraries of rules and models of cell signaling systems including: