Eccb/jbi 2005

tute, a platform of Genoma España, www.inab.org). The meeting is affiliated to the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Both INB and ISCB, together with the Spanish Bioinform-atics Network, the BioSapiens Network and the Steering Committee of the ECCB have played a key role in the promotion, organization and continuity of this international event. The ECCB series was founded to provide a European scientific forum for advances in computational biology and their applications in biology and medicine. The ECCB conference is a great opportunity to fulfill the exchange of ideas and experiences among the professionals of the bioinformatic sector. It is within the scheme introduced in 2002, that a different country or region will host ECCB every year. The regional bioinformatics conferences are integrated into this scheme, and they are elevated to ECCB when the corresponding country or region is hosting it. At this year's ECCB we wanted to stress the biological relevance of the methods developed and their applications. This often requires effective communication between people from different disciplines and diverse scientific cultures. To promote such interchange, one of the main sessions at ECCB/JBI 2005 has been devoted to present examples of successful collaborations between experimental and computational groups. The other nine sessions were devoted to several well-established areas, even though some of them were as novel as the new millennium, such as those related to high-throughput experimental developments. The sessions were distributed on the fol-There were six invited lectures by well-known researchers in different areas of computational biology. These presentations were organized as face-to-face keynote sessions with emphasis in the complementary views and discussions. Three major topics were debated: 'Perspectives in Bioinformatics', with Jean-Michel Claverie As in previous editions, long and short papers were scheduled to 30 and 10 min presentations respectively, including the corresponding round of questions. This year, in contrast with previous editions, short papers have also been published in this Bioinformatics special issue in a format that resembles Application Notes. In addition to the originality and relevance, emphasis has been made on the biological relevance of the results described in the papers. There were 209 paper submissions to the ECCB/JBI 2005 meeting. Among those, there were 157 long papers and 52 short papers. We cannot compare these figures with those of the past year, since in Glasgow ECCB was jointly organized with the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference. ISMB/ECCB 2004 received 492 paper …