生物网络及其一些进展

Biological Networks and Some of Their Developments

DNA双螺旋结构模型的提出,使得对生物学的认识进入到分子水平,开始了分子生物学的时代,并一直持续了半个世纪。当前,生物学的研究已进入后基因组时代,其特点是:从整体或系统的水平上去认识生物体,并诞生了系统生物学。生物系统是一种复杂系统。复杂系统的一个显著特点是多个参与者密切相互作用。复杂网络是描述复杂系统的一种有力工具,系统中的参与者可表示为网络中的点,相互作用可表示为网络中的连线。这样,复杂网络也可作为分析生物系统的一种工具,例如新陈代谢过程,参与作用的"底物"及其相互作用可用复杂网络描述。生物网络的研究已约有十年的历史,给出一简要综述,介绍它的一些进展,包括代谢网及其大尺度组织,无标度拓扑,分层等级模块结构,网络鲁棒性,自相似性及分形结构等等。

The presentation of the DNA double helix model led to that the understanding of biology got into the molecular level. Then the era of molecular biology began. This era sustained about half century. Now, the researches of biology are at the post-genomic era, in which the biological systems are studied at the ensemble- or system-level and the systems biology emerges. Biological systems are complex systems. One of the notable remarks of complex systems is that agents in the system interact closely between each other. The complex network is one of the approaches to describe the complex systems. The agents and their interactions in the complex systems can be represented as the nodes and links in the networks respectively. So the complex networks can be used to analyze the biological systems. For example, in the metabolic process, the substrates and their interaction can be described by a network. The researches of biological networks have a history about one decade. A brief review of the researches of the biological networks was given. Some of their developments were introduced, including the metabolic networks and the large-scale organization, scale-free topology, hierarchical modular structure, the robustness of networks, self-similarity and fractal structure, etc.