CMB'05: Workshop on Computational Methods in Bioinformatics

The Workshop on Computational Methods in Bioinformatics was held in Covilha between the 5th and 8th December 2005, as part of the 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The success of bioinformatics in recent years has been prompted by research in molecular biology and molecular medicine in initiatives like the human genome project. These initiatives gave rise to an exponential increase in the volume and diversification of data, including protein and gene data, nucleotide sequences and biomedical literature. The accumulation and exploitation of large-scale data bases prompts for new computational technology and for research into these issues. In this context, many widely successful computational models and tools used by biologists in these initiatives, such as clustering and classification methods for gene expression data, are based on artificial intelligence (Al) techniques. Hence, this workshop brought the opportunity to discuss applications of Al with an interdisciplinary character, exploring the interactions between sub-areas of Al and Bioinformatics. This year we had ten accepted papers focusing on up-to-date and highly relevant topics of Computational Bioinformatics. Papers reporting interesting work in progress were also accepted to be presented as posters. The full and short papers address the following themes: Using parallel algorithms in the Protein Folding problem, Search procedures in Molecular Sequence Databases, Three dimensional modelling of proteins and a Wrapper to easy the search for relevant information from different sources and formats. All of the above mentioned themes are of the outmost importance in the field of Bioinformatics. We hope the reader considers the work reported in the papers as useful contributions in Bioinformatics. Our special thanks to the members of the Program Committee for their work in the reviewing process allowing us to have three reviewers per paper. We would like to thank Marco Costa and Nuno Fonseca for helping us in the review process. Finally, our word of appreciation to all the authors who have submitted papers to the workshop, without whom none of this would have been possible.