The immune system is crucial in defending our body against “danger” signals and any aberration in this response could lead to infections, autoimmune diseases or cancer. Therefore, studying the immune system is of paramount importance in order to understand the molecular basis of host defense, molecular mechanism of diseases and potential drug targets.

On these lines, the Cell Interaction Group at the Bioinformatics Institute (A*STAR) has taken-up the challenge of building the first one-stop Cell Interaction Knowledgebase, an in silico computational platform on immune cell interaction for the Singapore and international immunology community. In particular, we have taken an informatics-driven approach to investigate and model the interactions of innate immune cells through soluble mediators like cytokines/chemokines, under normal as well as selected pathological conditions.

One of the integral parts of the Cell Interaction Knowledgebase is the generation of interactive Molecular Pathway Maps which explain how external stimuli (like cytokines) can be recognized by a target immune cell and how intracellular signaling is triggered, ultimately culminating in a response by the immune cell. As a part of this effort, the JC students will be involved in developing an user-interactive, animated JAK/STAT molecular pathway map for the Cell Interaction knowledgebase. JAK/STAT is the principle pathway triggered by cytokines during cytokine-mediated immune cell interaction. Targeting of cytokine signaling pathway has been an important research area especially to develop therapeutic strategies to modulate immunological pathology. This map will be the first of its kind in
- allowing the users to customize the pathways according to the cytokine/the receptor they choose;
- providing a spacio-temporal distribution of the signaling components across a dynamic frame;
- linking to details of the individual signaling molecules such as their property, structure, phosphorylation site, gene sequence, protein sequence etc.
This platform will thus be extremely helpful for students and researchers working on the molecular aspects of cytokine-induced signalling. On completion, this project will be incorporated in the Cell Interaction Knowledgebase site (http://cell-interaction.bii.a-star.edu.sg/), which would be released to the local and international community in a year time.