Complex Dynamical Systems as Networks

Many of the natural complex systems, including biological systems, are highly organized, extensively networked, and modular in both structure and function. With the sequencing of many genomes and tremendous advances in molecular biology techniques, much information is known about the details of many biological processes and macromolecular structures. A recent approach taken, by theorists and experimentalists, is toward describing biological systems as "networks" -- i.e., systems composed of elements interacting among each other in a complex manner.

A wide range of biological systems could be modeled as "complex networks". In many fields, the abstraction of networks has been used for understanding different phenomena. Most often networks are studied with Graph Theory, a mathematical formalism, although there are other ways of analyzing complex networks.

A great deal of work has been done in this field comparing structural properties of biological and engineered systems and exploring biologically relevant topological parameters. Yet a study of the literature shows there are many unsolved questions which could be dealt with this formalism.

Networks Formalism at Systems Level

Biology is perceived as one of the important fields where application of network abstraction is anticipated to offer crucial understanding of the laws of nature.

One such area where I use graph theoretical analysis is for characterising protein structures, exploring structure-function relationship, and further for designing statistical multi-body potentials. Broadly this could be classified as Structural Bioinformatics. The complexity and overwhelming amount of detail that the biological systems are characterized by could be potentially simplified using Network Biology approach. A specific case is that of Network Medicine, where an integrative, top-down strategy involving construction of molecular interaction networks to identify its control elements (key motifs, regulatory mechanisms and disease-specific targets).