In biology, the importance of networks has been recognized because biological processes and systems need to be studied holistically (concerning every part). That means biological systems cannot be reduced to arbitrarily small parts, but the minimal size of such a part still needs to be functional in a sense that the underlying organisms work.
One of the first insights in this respect is from Conrad Waddington, who conceived the idea of the epigenetic landscape in the 1940s . Here epigenetic means the study of heritable phenotype changes that do not change the DNA. On a molecular level within a biological cell of an organism (plant, animal, or human), the interactions between genes and gene products (proteins) can be represented as a gene network, e.g., as a transcriptional regulatory network or a protein network. In this network nodes correspond to genes and edges correspond to interactions between genes. This means that networks appear naturally in studying molecular interactions as their graphical visualization and mathematical representation.

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