Networks, Trees, and Landscapes


We use networks to organise our understanding of how different agents (individuals in a population, cells in an organism, proteins in a cell, …) interact and organise themselves.

Similarly we can trace relationships between individuals and cells over time and evolutionary or genealogical trees have been an organising principle in biology for a long time, predating Darwin and the theory of evolution by centuries.

Landscapes or manifolds allow us to visualise and think about dynamics of complex systems.

None of these conceptual frameworks by themselves provides an adequate representation through which we can understand the organisation, evolution, and changing nature of biological organisms. We are interested in the interplay and intersection of these organising principles and and how we can use them to make sense of living systems. In our work we are using networks, trees, and landscapes both as concepts and computational tools. The group has worked on both the mathematical foundations (e.g. of network sampling theory) and their biological uses (e.g. in the context of epigenetic landscapes in developmental biology).

Latest research

2019

Leander Dony; Fei He; Michael P.H. Stumpf

Parametric and non-parametric gradient matching for network inference: a comparison Journal Article

In: BMC Bioinformatics, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, ISSN: 1471-2105.

Links | BibTeX | Tags: Networks | trees and cell structures

2017

Thalia E. Chan; Michael P.H. Stumpf; Ann C. Babtie

Gene Regulatory Network Inference from Single-Cell Data Using Multivariate Information Measures Journal Article

In: Cell Systems, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 251–267.e3, 2017, ISSN: 2405-4712.

Links | BibTeX | Tags: Networks | trees and cell structures

2008

Michael P.H. Stumpf; Thomas Thorne; Eric de Silva; Ronald Stewart; Hyeong Jun An; Michael Lappe; Carsten Wiuf

Estimating the size of the human interactome Journal Article

In: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., vol. 105, no. 19, pp. 6959–6964, 2008, ISSN: 1091-6490.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Networks | trees and cell structures