Examples of evolving networks in chemistry I'm a master student working on networks analysis in general. A network is something that has nodes and there are links between the nodes. Nodes and links could have attributes. An evolving network is one that changes overtime (new nodes and links are added..etc). An example of that is Facebook. Nodes are users and links represent the friendship relationship. Users have attributes (gender, age ..etc). A Facebook network as you know is an example of a social network. 

The issue is that so many people studied traditional evolving networks like social networks, the web, or transportation networks. Currently I'm looking for novel examples of evolving networks to study them. So I thought there might be some examples in chemistry that could represent some kind of an evolving network. 

So my question: Can you give me examples in chemistry for evolving networks?
Synthetic Pathways

... is the only example I can think of right now.

As far back as 1971¹ people have been positing the possibility of an AI to search for novel synthesis paths, but only a couple of years ago a decent one was developed² which could interpret literature and create novel sets of steps for particular reactions -- for example, given a particular reactant and product, produce a set of steps which would produce one from the other. The particular focus of the paper for the 2012 one was to produce single-pot (multi-step) procedures to replace awkward separated multi-step syntheses, but in principle the procedure is generalisable to any path.


Sridharan, N.S., An Application of Artificial Intelligence to Organic Chemical Synthesis, Doctoral Thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, July 1971.
C M Gothard et al, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2012, 51, 7922 (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202155) but there's a good write-up by Philip Ball in Chemistry World, August 2012 issue.