Every day we use signals to control all sorts of devices from computers to cars – little did we know that evolution has supplied a similar solution for controlling cellular reactions within our own cells. Scientists in the UCD Centre for Science, Engineering & Technology, Systems Biology Ireland, in collaboration with their RIKEN partners in Japan have discovered a biological version of these switches, with built in fail-safe mechanisms. Understanding these switches, how they work, what their ‘codes’ are and what the outcome from them being switched on or off is will be a powerful tool in battling diseases such as cancer.
“Systems biologists want to understand and control cell behaviors and cell fate decisions in a way similar to how engineers understand and control complex machines. This will expand the capacities of biomedical research and medicine by adding solid physico-chemical, biological and mathematical approaches to their foundations”,explains Prof Boris Kholodenko (Deputy Director SBI).
A major challenge in current biomedical research is to understand the mechanism cells use to turn on and off biological decisions; knowing what the codes are for our biological switches will give us a powerful weapon we can use against disease.
Recent research undertaken in Systems Biology Ireland, and published in leading international journal ‘Cell’, focuses on understanding how breast cancer cells listen to two different signals using this systems biology approach. One signal causes these cells to grow, whereas the other causes these cells to differentiate. These signals activate or inactivate subsequent signalling potential which has been implicated in the progression of numerous types of cancer.
This work also solves the puzzle of how cells have unique responses to signals when using the same chemical reactions to generate them. The study reveals how cells rely on precise control of both the timing and location of these chemical reactions to create unique cellular responses out of seemingly identical chemical reaction networks. The researchers also found that the listening system is incredibly robust to noisy signals, meaning it can still function properly despite major alterations to its components and inexact messages.
In a larger context, a major result of this work is a validated mathematical model that represents the behaviour of this cellular signalling system.
“This is a brilliant example for how systems biology can unravel fundamental biological processes. This is what the science of the future looks like”, says Prof Walter Kolch (Director SBI).
This research was published in “Cell” on the 27th of May 2010 and was funded by an SFI Centre of Science and Engineering and Technology award and RIKEN.
