Reverse Engineering Biological Networks: Opportunities and Challenges in Computational Methods for Pathway Inference, Volume 1118

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157331689X ISBN 13: 9781573316897

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007

Computational biologists are striving to "reverse engineer" the underlying networks of interactions between the molecules in the cell. This volume and the conference it reports on attempt a systematic evaluation of reverse engineering methods. The DREAM project brings together a diverse group of researchers to clarify potentials and limitations of the enterprise of reverse engineering cellular networks. An important aspiration of the project is to compare the effectiveness of different methods in reverse engineering biological networks. Evaluating this requires a "gold standard" network for which at least the true topology of connections is known. Many participants, especially the computational biologists, believe that synthetic networks are good candidates for this purpose because, at least for now, only they can be described with certainty. Experimental biologists, however, worry that unless the project addresses real biological networks, it could evolve into a mathematical exercise with little impact on biology. These and other ideas are discussed.

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About the Author:

Gustavo Stolovitzky is the editor of Reverse Engineering Biological Networks: Opportunities and Challenges in Computational Methods for Pathway Inference, Volume 1118, published by Wiley. Andrea Califano is the editor of Reverse Engineering Biological Networks: Opportunities and Challenges in Computational Methods for Pathway Inference, Volume 1118, published by Wiley.

Review:

“The volume particularly excels at its primary goal, which is to honestly describe the progress made in network construction and the challenges still facing researchers.” (The Quarterly Review of Biology, June 2010)