One of the central problems of systems biology for the last decade has been to identify functional modules in biological networks. In the same way that sequence data can be interpreted and understood by defining distinct functional regions along the genome, such as coding regions or regulatory regions, statistical approaches to revealing distinct modules hope to organize large networks of protein-protein interactions or transcriptional regulation into distinct units associated with distinct biological functions. In this talk I will illustrate how two approaches from statistical physics, which may be interpreted as "inferring" modules or "encoding" the graph in terms of modules, respectively, may be used to reveal modules, including inferring the natural "scale" or optimal number of modules, and to quantify network modularity.
Coffee and cookies before the presentation at 3:15 pm, and refreshments after the presentation will both be served in Room 128.