title: General strategy for understanding intracellular molecular interaction cascades that elicit stimulus-invoked biological processes.
abstract: Recent advances in biology have been driven by chemical analyses of the substances that form living organisms. Such analyses are extremely powerful as way of learning about the static properties of molecular species, but relatively powerless for understanding their dynamic behaviors even though this dynamism is essential for organisms to perform various biological processes that perpetuate their lives. Thus, attempts to identify individual species and molecular interaction cascades that drive specific responses to external stimuli or environmental changes often fail. Here I propose a general strategy to address this problem. The strategy comprises two key elements: functional manipulation of a given protein molecule coupled with close monitoring of its biological effect, and construction of a knowledge base tailored for conjecture-driven experimentation. The original idea for this strategy co-evolved with and greatly helped a series of studies we recently performed to discover critical signal cascades and cellular components that regulate the cell cycle transition from G1to S phase.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Graduate School and Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo.
authors.forename: Hiroto
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Okayama
mesh_terms: D000251:Adenosine Triphosphatases / Q000378:metabolism; D003598:Cytoskeletal Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D042541:Intracellular Space / Q000378:metabolism*; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D015398:Signal Transduction
chemical_list: D003598:Cytoskeletal Proteins; D000251:Adenosine Triphosphatases