To fully appreciate the diversity and specificity of complex cellular signaling events, such as arrestin-mediated signaling from G protein-coupled receptor activation, a complex systems-level investigation currently appears to be the best option. A rational combination of transcriptomics, proteomics, and interactomics, all coherently integrated with applied next-generation bioinformatics, is vital for the future understanding of the development, translation, and expression of GPCR-mediated arrestin signaling events in physiological contexts. Through a more nuanced, systems-level appreciation of arrestin-mediated signaling, the creation of arrestin-specific molecular response "signatures" should be made simple and ultimately amenable to drug discovery processes. Arrestin-based signaling paradigms possess important aspects, such as its specific temporal kinetics and ability to strongly affect transcriptional activity, that make it an ideal test bed for next-generation of drug discovery bioinformatic approaches such as multi-parallel dose-response analysis, data texturization, and latent semantic indexing-based natural language data processing and feature extraction.
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.