A short introduction to the core concepts of network biology and why networks are often used in bioinformatics / systems biology. The presentation provides the minimal background and terminology required for learning about specific network databases (e.g. STRING) and tools (e.g. Cytoscape) as well as the data science of analyzing and visualizing networks.

0:00 Why networks: network abstraction and network visualization
0:30 Terminology: networks/graphs, nodes/vertices, and edges
1:26 Network types: undirected vs. directed and unweighted vs. weighted
2:52 Network sources: network databases, similarity networks, correlation networks, and text mining

References:
Szklarczyk et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2021 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33237...)
Kanehisa et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2008 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18077...)
Zhao et al., eLife, 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24980...)
Sabik et al., Cell Reports, 2020 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32937...)
Jensen et al., Nature Communications, 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24959...)