Systems biology of interferon responses.

摘要: The interferons (IFNs) are a pleiotropic family of cytokines that perform fundamental functions in protecting host organisms from disease and maintaining homeostasis. Like other multifunctional cytokines, excessive or inappropriate activity can cause toxicity even death. Therefore, have evolved specific highly regulated mechanisms to control the temporal tissue specificity production IFNs selection pathways genes be activated as effectors IFN response cells. There now numerous microarray datasets available enable "global" analysis involved response. This article describes INTERFEROME database, which assimilates expression profiling data its contents enables definition IFN-regulated genes, discovery pathways, regulatory networks, specificities