Molecular biology is concerned with the study of the presence of and interactions between molecules, at the cellular and sub-cellular level. In bioinformatics and systems biology, algorithms and tools are developed to model these interactions, with various goals: predicting yet unobserved interactions, assigning functions to yet unknown molecules through their relations with known molecules; predicting certain phenotypes such as diseases; or just to build up biological knowledge in a structured way.
Such interaction models are often best modelled as networks or graphs, which opens up the possibility of using a large number of readily available algorithms for inferring networks, performing simulations of biology, optimising paths or flows through networks, graph-based data integration and graph mining. Many of these algorithms can be applied (sometimes with slight alterations) to solve a particular biological problem, such as modeling transcriptional regulation or predicting protein interaction/complex formation, but also to derive systems behaviour by breaking down networks into modules or motifs with certain characteristics.
Date: June 30 – July 4, 2014
Target audience: Bioinformaticians; Computer scientists; Mathematicians; System biologists
Program: We give a brief overview of molecular biology, the advent of high-throughput measurement techniques and large databases containing biological knowledge, and the importance of networks to model all this. We will highlight a number of peculiar features of biological networks. Next, a number of basic network models (linear, Boolean, Bayesian) will be discussed, as well as methods of inferring networks from observed measurement data and of integrating various data sources and databases to refine networks. Once networks are derived they often serve as the cornerstone in the visualization, analysis and interpretation of high-throughput data; we will discuss a number of methods in this area.
As an alternative to static networks, a number of alternative dynamic network models more suited for high-level simulation of cellular behaviour for will be introduced. Finally, we will give some examples of algorithms exploiting the networks found to learn about biology, specifically for inspecting protein interaction networks and for finding active sub networks.
Keywords: Network representations; Network inference; Network mining; Network visualization; Network-assisted classification; Algorithms; Linear regression; Bayesian networks; Boolean networks; Graph mining; Machine learning
Course website: http://helix.ewi.tudelft.nl/nbic/abn
