Talk:Biological networks

Create start of new article on biological networks

Create start of new article: Biological networks. Anthony.Sebastian 04:26, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Interesting topic

You've actually touched on one of my areas of interest. As you know, I've spent many years working with computers in medicine, but, especially in security and reliability, I've had personal interests in applying biomedical concepts to computer networks.

When the first Internet worm propagated in (umm) 1987?, I watched a lot of very smart people running around reinventing a number of concepts of epidemiology. At one point, I asked one of the best security people around if he had considered the work of John Snow, and got the response of "who?"

If you look at Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, one familiar with both can imagine the backup router acting as an AV node backing up the SA node. I've applied epidemiological contact tracing principles to try to look for the patterns characteristic of secondary infection, of multiple infection sources, etc., but gotten relatively little interest. A few network security engineers think of "quarantine", most commonly citing SARS, but don't go into anything like the hierarchy of immunologic responses. Yet, I see parallels in the way we deal initially with distributed denial of service and a nonspecific macrophage response, while we divert the suspicious flow to analysis and start to develop the equivalent of immunoglobulins (e.g., blackhole routes). Too bad I can't find anyone interested in sponsoring an interdisciplinary team in this area. --Howard C. Berkowitz 05:09, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Wow! "...applying biomedical concepts to computer networks..." If you could give every computer on the network a sophisticated effective immune system, with Darwinian evolution built in, you'd get a ticket to Stockholm.

I started Biological networks while reading Dennis Bray's Wetware: A Computer in Every Cell. I'd played with bionets in working on Systems biology. There I cited:

Barabási AL (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Pub. ISBN 0-7382-0667-9

Watts DJ (2007) A twenty-first century science. Nature 445:489

Alon U (2003) Biological networks: the tinkerer as an engineer. Science 301:1866-7 PMID 14512615

Alon U (2007) Simplicity in biology. Nature 446:497

Prill RJ et al.(2004) Dynamic properties of network motifs contribute to biological network organization. PLoS Biol 3: e343

Sporns O, Kotter R (2004) Motifs in brain networks. PLoS Biol 2: e369

Alon U (2007) An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits. Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall/CRC

I also wrote about bionets in Life and further in mLife/Draft. Seemed like biological networks merited its own article. Anthony.Sebastian 03:00, 13 January 2010 (UTC)