DiCamillo2016 - Insulin signalling pathway - Rule-based model

Barbara Di Camillo, Azzurra Carlon, Federica Eduati & Gianna Maria Toffolo. A rule-based model of insulin signalling pathway. BMC Systems Biology 10, 1 (2016).

The insulin signalling pathway (ISP) is an important biochemical pathway, which regulates some fundamental biological functions such as glucose and lipid metabolism, protein synthesis, cell proliferation, cell differentiation and apoptosis. In the last years, different mathematical models based on ordinary differential equations have been proposed in the literature to describe specific features of the ISP, thus providing a description of the behaviour of the system and its emerging properties. However, protein-protein interactions potentially generate a multiplicity of distinct chemical species, an issue referred to as "combinatorial complexity", which results in defining a high number of state variables equal to the number of possible protein modifications. This often leads to complex, error prone and difficult to handle model definitions.