Chapter 21 - Biomolecular networks

Abstract

A representation of a collection of relationships between items is called a network. In general, the relationships are referred to as edges, links, or connections, while the entities are termed nodes or vertices. Nodes can represent specific physical objects (like proteins, metabolites, people, computers, etc.) or intricate concepts (such cell type, disease, developmental stage). Biomolecular networks have previously proven to be extremely advantageous in the characterization of intricate biological systems that originate from the interactions between individual biomolecules. Biomolecular networks, though gain popularity only in the past few years, are now frameworks that enable many molecular biology discoveries. A single gene or a small group of genes is unable to fully comprehend many occurrences, including those connected to diseases, due to the strong interaction between the molecular components of living systems. These vast interdependencies are embodied in molecular networks, which depict all kinds of interactions between molecular entities and provide a framework for their mining from a systemic perspective to extract information. Such networks include gene regulatory networks (GRNs), protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, metabolic networks, cell signaling networks, neuronal networks, disease drug interaction and so on. These networks are used for exploring the tangled phenomena of human diseases from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. They are frequently produced from high-throughput omics datasets.