Rosalba Giugno, University of Catania, Italy

Network Analysis Systems for Biomedical Applications
Since many biological systems arise from complex interactions between components (people, cells, proteins, DNA, RNA and molecules), biomedical analysis requires the analysis of complex inter and intra cellular networks. Such networks are naturally modeled as large graphs. Cytoscape, a software platform for the visualization of biomedical interaction networks is introduced. In a given network, locating subgraphs is useful to characterize or to understand specific functionalities. NetMatch, a Cytoscape plugin which allows searches for all subcomponents of the network matching a given query is described. Finally, an overview of the main Cytoscape plugins such as cPath (a software for collecting, storing, and querying pathways) and Metabolica (a software for searching motifs in pathways) is given.