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Welcome to the website of the Network Biology Group

The Network Biology (NetBiol) Group is at the Department of Genetics of the Eötvös Loránd University. The NetBiol Group works in close cooperation with the LINK-Group led by Prof. Peter Csermely and with the experimental C. elegans lab led by Tibor Vellai. Our completed research projects include (1) the development of a signaling pathway database, which focuses especially on signaling cross-talk, (2) the identification of novel signalling proteins, (3) the development of the PathwayLinker webservice that analyzes the signaling pathway memberships of proteins as well as their interactors for experiment design and evaluation.

Currently, we are focusing on the systems-level analysis of the signaling flow and the processes that regulate signaling pathways. We are examining the connection between the networks of signaling and autophagy, a cellular degrative process, which affects aging and tumorgenesis.

A summary paper of our results appeared in Science Signaling: Network-based tools in the identification of novel drug-targets

A summary paper and an accompanying slide show of our work appeared in the May 2011 issue of Science Signaling. Slides were updated from the opening presentation at the International Conference on Systems Biology of Human Disease (SBHD) in Boston, Massachusetts, 16 to 18 June 2010. The paper contains several novel ideas on network dynamics and drug design, a summary of our very recent results as well as a brief description of a few ongoing projects. The paper is available here and the accompanying slideshow is downloadable from here.

The concept of signalogs has been published in PLoS ONE

In connection with the SignaLink database, we published the concept of signaling orthologs, called signalogs in PLoS ONE. The paper (which also contains and experimental "proof-of-concept" on the predicting power of SignaLink) can be downloaded from here. To identify signalogs on genomic scale, we systematically transferred signaling pathway annotations among three animal species, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and humans. We predicted 88 worm, 92 fly, and 73 human novel signaling components. Furthermore, we developed an on-line tool and an interactive orthology network viewer to allow users to predict and visualize components of orthologous pathways. Our approach predicts signaling roles for 19 human orthodisease proteins and 5 known drug targets, and suggests 14 novel drug target candidates.

The SignaLink database has been published in Bioinformatics

SignaLink is a uniformly curated signaling pathway resource for cross-talk analysis of Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens.

Analyses of a uniformly curated signaling pathway database of the 3 metazoans revealed novel pathway components, drug target candidates, and produced a large-scale view of the cross-talk network of pathways where tissue-specific cross-talk utilization was discovered.