Topology and dynamics of complex biological systems

The myriad of high-throughput methods available for probing biological
samples has drastically boosted our ability to gather comprehensive molecular-level information
on an increasing number of organisms. Unfortunately, our understanding of biological systems has
not grown proportionally. I
will talk about two different problems in which the analysis of large
pools of data can help us
extract knowledge from the "sea" of available information: evolutionary
processes and the
organization of complex networks. First, I will show that the systematic
analysis of protein
families enables us to assess evolutionary relationships between species
and to discriminate
between theories about the origin of eukaryotes. Second, I will present
a set of methods that is
able to accurately extract the hierarchical organization of complex
networks and how such methods
are able to summarize the information stored in biochemical networks.