A model predicts that just a little active death receptor is enough to activate caspases for cell death if FLIP is absent (right).
Models are mostly used to study relatively simple and well-understood biological systems. Complex systems, in contrast, have so many unknowns that an overwhelming amount of data is needed to complete a model.
But Bentele et al. show that CD95-induced cell death can be simplified. The authors found that the activity or concentration of many molecules involved in this death pathway (such as caspases and Bcl family proteins) are unaffected by large changes in most parameters (including binding kinetics and reaction speeds). So they broke down their original model into modules—groups of molecules that change in response to changes in the same set of...
