Category — Computation

Computational biologists and ecologists at various leading US Universities have discovered an interesting use for Google’sPageRank, the algorithm that determines which pages are considered most important for displaying search results.  They’ve modified PageRank for modelling fragile ecosystems – in particular, they’re using it to determine which species are most critical, the ones whose extinction will most likely lead to total ecosystem collapse.  From the Wired article:

“While several previous studies have looked at the robustness of food webs to a variety of sequences of species loss, none of them have come up with a way to identify the most devastating sequence of extinctions,” said food web biologist Jennifer Dunne of the Santa Fe Institute, who was not involved in the research. Using a modified version of PageRank, Dunne said, the researchers were able to identify which species extinctions within a food web would lead to biggest chain-reaction of species death.

“If we can find the way of removing species so that the destruction of the ecosystem is the fastest, it means we’re ranking species by their importance,” said ecologist Stefano Allesina of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the paper published Friday in PLoS Computational Biology.”

This kind of research can help determine which species need the most protection.  Not only that, but PageRank is attracting interest from other biologists who see it as a promising approach to intricate problems like gene regulation and protein interaction.  [Check out this post's mirror on w0rd.ca!]