Using Networks to Discover Biology in Complex Systems

As new technologies are providing us with ever-richer, more complex data sets that capture diverse yet complementary information about biological systems, our challenge is to move beyond simple correlations and explore the complex networks that drive biological systems. I will draw upon separate, but interwoven threads of network analysis that have proven very fruitful in our work, including inference and comparison of gene regulatory networks using a message-passing framework, exploring the diversity and distribution of networks within a phenotype and in state transitions, and exploring the structure of networks as a means of interpreting the factors driving complex, multifactorial phenotypes.