Network biology: Recent advances and challenges

Biological networks have garnered widespread attention. The development of biological networks has spawned the birth of a new interdisciplinary field – network biology. Network biology involves the exploration of complex biological systems through biological networks for better understanding of biological functions. This paper reviews some of the recent development of network biology. On the one hand, various approaches to constructing different types of biological networks are reviewed, and the pros and cons of each approach are discussed; on the other hand, the recent advances of information mining in biological networks are reviewed. The principles of guilt-by-association and guilt-by-rewiring in network biology and their applications are discussed. Although great advances have been achieved in the field of network biology over the past decades, there are still many challenging issues. First, efficient and reliable network inference algorithms for high-dimensional and highly noisy omics data are still in great demand. Second, the research focus will be on multilayer biological network theory. This plays a critical role in the exploration of the multi-scale or dynamical characteristics of complex biomolecular networks by integrating multi-source heterogeneous omics data. Third, a close cooperation among biologists, medical workers, and researchers from network science is still a prerequisite in the applications of network biology. The rapid development of network biology will undoubtedly raise important clues for understanding complex phenotypes in biological systems.