Computational approaches to modeling of molecular interactions in multicellular systems

Abstract

Cells in metazoans co-exist as multicellular communities, where coordinated interactions within and between cells determine the phenotype of the cell community as a whole. With the recent technological advances in cell sorting and genome-wide molecular profiling techniques, it is now possible to perform unbiased systems analyses of heterogeneous cell populations within multicellular systems. Functional analyses of such multi-layered high throughput data is greatly facilitated by computational tools to build coherent models of molecular interactions in multicellular systems. I will discuss different computational techniques of pathway-level analyses of genomic data, and the recent efforts of their extension to the analyses of heterogeneous cell populations.