Perspective Hypergraphs and Cellular Networks

Abstract

The understanding of biological networks is a fundamental issue in computational biology. When analyzing topological properties of networks, one often tends to substitute the term ‘‘network’ ’ for ‘‘graph’’, or uses both terms interchangeably. From a mathematical perspective, this is often not fully correct, because many functional relationships in biological networks are more complicated than what can be represented in graphs. In general, graphs are combinatorial models for representing relationships (edges) between certain objects (nodes). In biology, the nodes typically describe proteins