It is no coincidence that physicists are moving towards biology. Modern biology and medicine involve both complex physical and chemical methods (e.g. detailed simulations of protein molecules are obtained using X-ray lasers and accelerators), and a vast amount of data, which can only be analysed using powerful computer equipment and intelligently optimised algorithms. The combination of high volumes of data with biology has even led to the development of a separate discipline - bioinformatics.

According to one of the authors of the study - the Head of MIPT's Department of Discrete Mathematics and Head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Research at Yandex, Andrei Raigorodskii, mathematicians became involved because the task required, among other things, an expert opinion in graph theory, which was actively used as part of the project. "Not only the Department of General and Applied Physics is moving towards lifescience; mathematicians, who incidentally are playing an increasingly significant role at MIPT, are also interested in applying their methods to problems in biology and medicine. "The "complex networks" that my research departments at MIPT and Yandex are actively using are found everywhere in our environment and society: we have social networks, and the Internet itself, networks in economics, and networks in biology too. I am pleased that our collaboration has resulted in an interesting and informative publication, and I look forward to the topic being developed further."

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