Journal of Computer Science & Systems Biology

Modeling Dissemination of Pathogenic Fungi within a Host: A Cartoon for the Interactions of Two Complex Systems

Abstract

Katarzyna M Tyc and Edda Klipp

The understanding of host-pathogen interactions is a field of outmost importance for human health and prototype for biological research. However, it is not yet systematically tackled by approaches dealing both with the complexity of the pathogen and the host in isolation and with the multitude of their mutual interactions. The ultimate goal of classic microbiology is to capture all the principles underlying every genomes’ and proteomes’ member functions as well as its complex interactions, responses to different physical and chemical stimuli, drugs and multiple combinations of any of them. The field of systems biology aims at system-level understanding of biological systems and as such is strongly dependent on experimental data. The systeome models capturing genome and proteome interactions as well as spatial and dynamic information will be extremely useful for medical applications and provide a great potential for pharmaceutical companies for novel drug discoveries and for generating predictions of theirs applications. With constantly evolving experimental techniques as well as a growing computer infrastructure it seems feasible in the future to generate systeome models, to run numerical simulations on them and to derive medically relevant predictions. A priori it is conceivable to use systeome models to monitor a disease progress. In case the disease is driven by a pathogen disseminating within a host, systeome models will be used to control the infection, block it and even reverse it leading to elimination of the invading microbe from the host. We give here a cartoon for the invasion of the host by a commensal opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans as an example for such a systeome project. This way we discuss the perspectives of host-pathogen interaction studies and the challenges of related modeling projects.