Role of Artifacts in Quantitative Network Analysis

All metabolic processes in living system are governed by a uniquefeature called as “Stochasticity”. A stochastic process is one whosebehavior is non-deterministic. Noise/Artifacts are characterized bystochasticity as their also cannot be determined. Noise/Artifacts highly influence cellular function and development. They also disrupt the signals propagating through networks and perturb a system from itsoptimal steady state. They can drive cells to different phenotypicstates. Furthermore, they can be beneficial to biological systems inmany circumstances too. Till date, studies have shown and focused onnoise as a potentially undesirable perturbation. But it is not necessary that such negative effects will play greater role than positive effects. Concepts such as “stochastic resonance” are standards for how noise can be beneficial to processes like signal detection and transduction. Stochastic resonance is observed when noise added to a system changes the behavior of the system in some way. In this manuscript,we have made an elaborate review of the current approaches and techniques used for detecting noise/artifacts in a biological network as well as tried to propose a framework for analyzing theseartifacts/noises.