Alzpathway, an updated map of curated signaling pathways: Towards deciphering Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder in which loss of neurons and synaptic function causes dementia in the elderly. To clarify AD pathogenesis and develop drugs for AD, thousands of studies have elucidated signaling pathways involved. However, knowledge of AD signaling pathways has not been compiled as a pathway map. In this chapter, we introduce the manual construction of a pathway map in AD which we call "AlzPathway", that comprehensively catalogs signaling pathways in the field of AD. We have collected and manually curated over 100 review articles related to AD, and have built the AD pathway map. AlzPathway is currently composed of thousands of molecules and reactions in neurons, brain blood barrier, presynaptic, postsynaptic, astrocyte, and microglial cells, with their cellular localizations. AlzPathway provides a systems-biology platform of comprehensive AD signaling and related pathways which is expected to contribute to clarification of AD pathogenesis and AD drug development.