Networks and Mycobacterium tuberculosis

The complexity of biological systems warrants addressing the problems in a holistic manner, as against the well established methods of analyzing these problems in a reductionist manner. One of the ways to address these problems at the systems level is to use interactions among components of the systems, and attempt to study all these interactions in a well defined context.  In our laboratory we have been studying protein: protein interactions, and transcriptional regulatory circuits to understand the biology of mycobacterium tuberculosis. Our hypothesis is that studying the regulatory interactions as a function time and environmental signals, would lead to enhancement of our knowledge of the bacterium.  We have attempted to integrate data from many different sources in the construction of networks.  Analyses of these networks from the well established principles of Graph Theory is currently under progress. Results of some of our analyses will be presented.