NSF Workshop on Shared Organizing Principles in the Computing and Biological

Sciences, May 25-26, 2010

Networks and my

other playgroundsother playgrounds

Luis A. Nunes Amaral

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Dept. of Medicine

Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

The communication gap

How many biologists do you

need for counting worm eggs?

How many modelers do you

need in order to predict their

counting?counting?

What do you need for them to

believe one another?

1

What don’t we know?

2

Metabolism

3

Protein interaction networks

Giot et al. Science 302, 1727 (2003)

Too much information

5

My solution…

Guimera, Amaral. Nature 433, 895 (2005) 6

Detect hierarchies

Sales-Pardo, Guimera, Moreira, Amaral, PNAS 104, 15224 (2007) 7

Cartographic representation

Amaral, PNAS 105, 6795 (2008) 8