ISMB 2016 Proceedings

This special issue of Bioinformatics serves as the proceedings of the 24th annual conference Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), which took place in Orlando, Florida, July 8–12, 2016 (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2016). ISMB 2016, the official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB, http://www.iscb.org/), was accompanied by 11 Special Interest Group meetings of 1 or 2 days each, and two satellite meetings. Since its inception, ISMB has been the largest international conference in computational biology and bioinformatics. It is the leading forum in the field for presenting new research results, disseminating methods and techniques and facilitating discussions among leading researchers, practitioners and students in the field. The 42 papers in this volume were selected from 188 original submissions divided into 5 Themes and 11 associated Areas, collectively led by 10 Theme Chairs and 22 Area Chairs (Tables 1 and 2). For each area, the Area Chairs selected an expert program committee for their subdiscipline and oversaw the reviewing process for that area in coordination with the corresponding Theme Chairs. By design, the Theme and Area Chairs included a mix of experienced individuals reappointed from previous years and experts newly recruited to ensure broad technical expertise and to promote inclusivity of various elements of the research community. In total, the review process involved the 10 Theme Chairs, the 22 Area Chairs, 331 program committee members and an additional 129 external reviewers recruited as subreviewers by program committee members. Table 2 provides a summary of the areas, Area Chairs and a summary of the reviews by area. The conference used a slightly streamlined two-tier review system—a continuation and refinement of a process that begun with ISMB/ECCB 2013 in an effort to better ensure thorough and fair reviewing. Under the revised process, each of the 188 submissions was first reviewed by at least three expert referees, with a subset receiving between four and six reviews, as needed. Consensus on each paper was reached through online discussion among reviewers, Area Chairs and Theme Chairs. Among the 188 submissions, 42 were accepted for publication conditionally on revisions properly addressing the comments of the reviewers. All revised versions were