SYSCID behind the scenes - Visiting UL

Anastasia Filia, researcher at BRFAA visited the Luxembourg team for a 3-day introduction to disease maps. Generating a disease map is a central part within SYSCID in order to develop comprehensive representations of disease mechanisms and build a collection of interconnected signaling, metabolic and gene regulatory pathways relevant to each disease.

The hands-on training included the two platforms CellDesigner and MINERVA. The former is used to design the map and in particular the signaling pathways involved in the disease of interest. After a general introduction, Anastasia had the chance to draft a first pathway of her own selecting a review paper on SLE pathogenesis.

The MINERVA platform is developed by the University of Luxembourg specifically to support the development and exploration of disease maps. MINERVA allows to visualize the SYSCID map and makes it interactive. It enables for example the overlay of experimental data over the molecular mechanisms of the disease, or indicating related drugs and their targets on the map by querying directly the relevant drug target databases, like DrugBank or ChEMBL.