Networks in biological systems: An investigation of the GeneOntology as an evolving network

摘要

Many biological systems can be described as networks where differentelements interact, in order to perform biological processes. We introduce a networkassociated with the Gene Ontology. Specifically, we construct a correlation-basednetwork where the vertices are the terms of the Gene Ontology and the link betweeneach two terms is weighted on the basis of the number of genes that they have incommon. We analyze a filtered network obtained from the correlation-based networkand we characterize its evolution over different releases of the Gene Ontology.