Network Inference and Reconstruction in Bioinformatics

Systems biology focuses on the integration of experimental, mathematical and computational techniques to develop systemic views and predictive models of biological systems. In this perspective, the concept of network has been a powerful tool for the representation and the analysis of complex systems: during the last two decades, the so-called network biology approach has been fruitfully applied in many different biological areas, from gene regulation, to protein-protein interactions, to neural signals. Here, making no claim to completeness, we briefly account for the processes of reconstructing several among the most significant types of biological networks in molecular biology and neuroscience, as well as for some of the most promising methodologies applied in the recent field of network medicine.