Fig. 1

Signaling network of pathology-associated proteins in intervertebral disc degeneration diseases. Reported pathology-associated proteins in intervertebral disc diseases were used as signaling nodes and input into the meta-search engine of protein–protein interaction database String. Interactions from experiment, database, neighborhood, gene fusion, co-expression, and co-occurrence were included in the search. The confidence score of 0.15 was used and only direct protein–protein interactions were counted. We included 70 genes with highest confidence and interaction scores in the signaling network for later experiments. Cyan, pink, green, blue, and black lines indicate known interactions from curated databases, experiments determined, gene neighborhood, gene co-occurrence, and co-expression, respectively. Gene names of these proteins were used in the figure