Analysis of Biological Networks

Abstract

Biological processes such as the interaction between proteins or metabolic reactions can be represented by networks which can be modeled by graphs. Biological networks are present in the cell and outside the cell. Our aim in this chapter is to first introduce the networks in the cell and analyze them as graphs. Centrality analysis provides information about the important nodes and edges in biological networks and we describe algorithms to find various centrality measures. The main problems to investigate in the graph structure of a biological network are the module detection, discovery of recurrent subgraphs called network motifs and aligning two or more networks as we discuss. We will see these networks have interesting features such as small-world, scale-free properties which are not found in random networks. All of these problems are discussed in detail in the rest of this part of the book.