ABSTRACT
Cellular molecules exert their functions through interactions with other molecules, which could occur in the same cell, or across cells, organs or even organisms. The chapter “Graph Theory and Physics Meet Network Biology” provides a critical perspective on the manifold contributions of physical science to network-based approaches related to systems biology. In particular, the chapter introduces the use of mutual information and network entropy in inferential scheme, describes the new centrality measures inspired by physics and currently used in network analysis, and discusses the problem of synthetic gold-standard datasets generation for network inference performance assessment. The content of this chapter is also preparatory to the topics covered in the next chapter from an applicative point of view.
