This, the 4th Transactions on Computational Systems Biology volume, contains carefully selected and enhanced contributions presented at the first Converging Science conference held at the University of Trento, Italy, in December 2004.

Dedicated especially to models and metaphors from biology to bioinformatics tools, the 11 papers selected for the special issue cover a wide range of bioinformatics research, such as foundations of global computing, interdisciplinarity in innovation initiatives, biodiversity, and more.

This volume presents the proceedings of the First International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB 2009). This conference was supported by the International Society for Computers and Applications (ISCA) and Springer. Computational techniques have already enabled unprecedented advances in modern biology and medicine. This continues to be a vibrant research area with broadening of computational techniques and new emerging challenges. The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB) conference has the goal of promoting the advancement of computing techniques and...

This volume contains the papers presented at RECOMB 2009: the 13th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology held in Tucson, Arizona, USA, during May 18-21, 2009. The RECOMB conference series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner, and Michael Wat- man. RECOMB 2009 was hosted by the University of Arizona, organized by a committeechairedbyJohnKececioglu, andtookplaceatTheWestinLaPaloma Resort and Spa in Tucson, Arizona. This year, 37 papers were acccepted for presentation out of 166 submissions. The papers presented were selected by the Program...

The5th editionof the InternationalSymposium onBioinformaticsResearchand Applications (ISBRA 2009) was held during May 13-16, 2009 at Nova Sou- eastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The symposium provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and prac- tioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. The technical program of the symposium included 26 contributed papers, selected by the Program Committee from a number of 55 full submissions - ceived in response to the call for papers. The technical...

This volume contains a selection of the best contributions delivered at the 5th InternationalMeetingonComputationalIntelligenceMethodsforBioinformatics andBiostatistics(CIBB 2008)held atIIASS "E. R. Caianiello,"Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy during October 3-4, 2008. The CIBB meeting series is organized by the Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) to provide a forum open to researchersfrom di?erent disciplines to present and discuss pr- lems concerning computational techniques in bioinformatics, systems biology and medical informatics...

Data integration in the life sciences continues to be important but challe- ing. The ongoing development of new experimental methods gives rise to an increasingly wide range of data sets, which in turn must be combined to allow more integrative views of biological systems. Indeed, the growing prominence of systems biology, where mathematical models characterize behaviors observed in experiments of di?erent types, emphasizes the importance of data integration to the life sciences. In this context, the representation of models of biological behavior as data in turn gives rise to challenges...

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 4th Brazilian Sym- sium on Bioinformatics, BSB 2009, which was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, during August 29-31, 2009. The BSB symposium had its origins in the Brazilian Workshop on Bioinformatics (WOB). WOB had three editions, in 2002 (Gramado, RS), in 2003 (Macae, RJ), and in 2004 (Brasilia, DF). The change in the designation from wo- shop to symposium reflects the increase in the quality of the contributions and also in the interest of the scientific community for the meeting. The previous editions of BSB took place in Sao...

This volume contains the proceedings of the 7th Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology (CMSB 2009), held in Bologna, from August 31 to September 1, 2009. The ?rst CMSB was held in Trento in 2003, bringing together life scientists, computer scientists, engineers and physicists. The goal was to promote the c- vergence of di?erent disciplines aiming at a new understanding and description of biological systems, ?rmly ground in formal models, supported by compu- tionallanguagesandtools, ando?eringnew methodsofanalysis.The conference then moved to Paris in 2004, Edinburgh in 2005,...

These proceedings contain papers from the 2009 Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during September 12-13, 2009. WABI 2009 was the ninth annual conference in this series, which focuses on novel algorithms that address imp- tantproblemsingenomics, molecularbiology, andevolution.Theconference- phasizes research that describes computationally e?cient algorithms and data structures that have been implemented and tested in simulations and on real data. WABI is sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical C-...

As genome-sequencing costs continue their downward spiral, sequencing of closely related organisms has become increasingly a?ordable. The growing amount of genomic data available demands for the constant development of computational tools to be applied in comparative genomics. The RECOMB Workshop on C- parative Genomics (RECOMB-CG) is devoted to bringing together scientists working on all aspects of comparative genomics, from computer scientists, ma- ematicians and statisticians working on novel computational approaches for genome analysis and comparison, to biologists applying these...