Network Building of Proteins in a Biochemical Pathway: A Computational Biology Related Model for Target Discovery and Drug-Design

Abstract

With the advances in bioinformatics, drug design strategies have been advanced with the focus on target discovery. 'Proteins and enzymes' target class represents potential drug target for different diseases. A networking of biochemical pathway of a disease and their drug target needs a thorough understanding. The accessibility of fully sequenced genomes, its total information and their product (proteins and enzymes) have enabled researchers to reconstruct and study the networks based biochemical pathways. Network building of proteins in a biochemical pathway is of utmost importance which helps us to identify the protein (enzyme or receptor) as drug target whose inhibition will achieve to discover a set of compounds (drug like molecules), while incurring minimal side effects. In this paper, we have discussed about the networking of proteins using biochemical pathway which can be used as target for drug development, architecture of biochemical networks, network algorithms, tools and software packages for network building. Keywords: Network building, biochemical pathway, target discovery, drug-design.