Harnessing formal concepts of biological mechanism to analyze human disease.

ABSTRACT: Mechanism is a widely used concept in biology. In 2017, more than 10% of PubMed abstracts used the term. Therefore, searching for and reasoning about mechanisms is fundamental to much of biomedical research, but until now there has been almost no computational infrastructure for this purpose. Recent work in the philosophy of science has explored the central role that the search for mechanistic accounts of biological phenomena plays in biomedical research, providing a conceptual basis for representing and analyzing biological mechanism. The foundational categories for components of mechanisms-entities and activities-guide the development of general, abstract types of biological mechanism parts. Building on that analysis, we have developed a formal framework for describing and representing b

SUBMITTER: Darden L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6306204 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature