Introduction to minitrack: computational issues in bioinformatics

With a strong foundation in Computational Biology and Computational Chemistry, Bioinformatics is fast emerging as one of the most exciting scientific disciplines in the twenty-first century. A true multidisciplinary field of study, Bioinformatics deals with the development and use of mathematical and computational methods to assist in modeling and solving problems in biosciences. Employing algorithmic approaches are expected to be essential to the development and advancement of many fields in biosciences. This, in part, is due to the recent explosion of biological data, which requires an associated increase in the scale and sophistication of the automated systems and tools that enable researchers to take advantage of its availability. Additionally, there are a large number of research projects and applications that demands automated computational support. The need for Bioinformatics reflects the radical changes that the biological sciences have undergone recently. As more important biological elements are studied and their roles in complex biological systems are discovered, it is apparent that integrating computational research and experimental work will be crucial in exploring and understanding these discoveries. Although the Bioinformatics Minitrack focuses on the computational issues in Bioinformatics, its main goal is to provide a venue for researchers from all related fields to present new integrated approaches to address real Bioinformatics problems. This is apparent in all five papers that comprise the minitrack. Each paper presents a new concept, tool or technique that is motivated by an important problem related to Bioinformatics. The first two papers in the minitrack deal with issues related to whole genomes. In the first paper, “Comparative Genome Anotation for Mapping, Prediction and discovery of Genes,” by Kappen and Salbaum, the analysis of specific chromosomes in two genomes, the human genome and the muse genome, leads to fully assemble a large contiguous sequence that contains fourteen genes. While the paper leaning toward the bioscience aspect of Bioinformatics, the second paper employs computational techniques to deal with alignment problems at the genome level. In the paper, titled, “A Prototype for Multiple Whole Genome Alignment,” by