Network Theory

This network made digg about a month ago. I thought it was interesting because I actually saw it a year ago. You'll find that network/graph theory is a big topic in Bioinformatics.

I personally find its use in Bioinformatics to be a little bit of a double edge sword. Their importance has emerged as these networks are used to present a systematic overview of various biological processes (i.e. all the gene interactions at a given time in the cell). Which is one of the overall goals of Systems Biology as I briefly touched on in my previous post.

But at the same time their novelty has also caused their misuse in biological community. You may find biologists who want to include these networks in there study but have no knowledge of how they are constructed. One of the Ph.D. students in my lab terms these networks use as fancy bioinformatic "hand waving". Which is what they are some of the time. The point is, these theoretical networks should be taken for what they are, a tool that facilitates further interpretation, not a concrete view of how a system works.