[1] Those components can be regulatory elements, genes, mRNAs, proteins, and metabolites.
The description includes the interplay of regulatory effects between these components, and their dependence on variables such as subcellular localization, tissue, developmental stage, and pathological state.
Signaling pathways are groups of proteins that produce an effect in a chain that transmit a signal from one part of the cell to another part, for example, linking the presence of substance at the exterior of the cell to the activation of the expression of a gene.
Modeling can handle the data and allow to test a hypothesis (for example, gene A is regulated by protein B) that can be verified experimentally.
This will facilitate the design of drugs for therapy,[6] the control of stem cell differentiation, and the prognosis of disease.