Dec. 19 2005 10:50AM

Dec. 19 2005 11:40AM

Networks of interactions are fundamental to many key biological processes. At a bio-molecular level, they arise in the study of gene transcriptional regulation, protein-protein interactions and metabolism. Furthermore, ecological and social networks are of critical importance in several environmental questions as well as in the mechanisms of disease spread. The numerous advances in techniques for biological measurement made in recent years have made it possible to study the fundamental bio-molecular networks behind cellular processes in a more comprehensive way than was previously possible. This has led to an explosion of interest in the field of biological network research and several broad areas of study have now emerged. These include identifying the key structural properties of networks of transcriptional regulations and protein-protein interactions, relating these properties to biological mechanisms and devising new methodologies and algorithms to exploit our knowledge of interaction networks to address fundamental biological questions. The mathematical discipline of Graph Theory is central to all of the efforts made in this field.

The purpose of this talk is to give an overview of some of the major advances made in biological network analysis in recent years and to highlight several outstanding issues that need to be addressed. I shall concentrate for the most part on results pertaining to Protein-Protein interaction (PPI) networks and tools that have been developed for their analysis. In particular, I shall discuss a number of recent results from the following broad areas:

• The development of mathematical models for the evolution of PPI networks;
• The use of centrality measures to identify essential proteins from the structure of a PPI network;
• Algorithms for the identification of communities or modules in networks and their application to the functional classification of genes and proteins.

At the end of the talk, I shall attempt to highlight some of the key open questions in the use of graph theoretical methods in Biology that need addressing.

International Workshop on Data - Algorithms - Decision Making (Contact person: Martin Janžura)