Biological Networks

Synonyms

Biological pathways; Molecular interaction graphs; Signal transduction networks; Transcriptional networks; Protein-protein interaction networks

Definition

A biological network is a graph-structured representation of binarized interactions among biological objects. Typically, the nodes in such a graph represent biological molecules, and the edges are labeled to represent different forms of interactions between molecules.

Example: A transcriptional network is a directed graph where a node represents either a protein (a transcription factor) or a region of the chromosome such that the edges can be constructed from the protein node to the chromosomal region. The edge in the graph represents that the protein can initiate the transcription (production of messenger RNA) process.

Key Points

A biological network is typically a node and edge attributed graph, where the edges can have different semantics depending on the kind of network. In some networks, the edges may be weighted,...