Tutorial on biological networks

Understanding how the functioning of a biological system emerges from the interactions among its components is a long-standing goal of network science. Fomented by developments in high-throughput technologies to characterize biomolecules and their interactions, network science has emerged as one of the fastest growing areas in computational and systems biology research. Although the number of research and review articles on different aspects of network science is increasing, updated resources that provide a broad, yet concise, review of this area in the context of systems biology are few. The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the research on biological networks to a general audience, who have some knowledge of biology and statistics, but are not necessarily familiar with this research field. Based on the different aspects of network science research, the article is broadly divided into four sections: (1) network construction, (2) topological analysis, (3) network and data integration, and (4) visualization tools. We specifically focused on the most widely studied types of biological networks, which are, metabolic, gene regulatory, protein–protein interaction, genetic interaction, and signaling networks. In future, with further developments on experimental and computational methods, we expect that the analysis of biological networks will assume a leading role in basic and translational research. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.