Editorial for Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop Special Issue 2012

This paper surveys the contents of the special issue on Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop 2012 with six contributed papers. They cover a rich variety of topics on interface of life sciences and data intensive computation which in detail are parallelization with GPU and multicore of an important tandem mass spectrometry peptide identification tool MyriMatch; enhancement of approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) to estimate distributions of parameter values for mechanistic model of biological systems such as kinetic rates in a parallel environment; study of high-throughput virtual screening using a parallel version of Autodock4 to screen one-million compounds; GPU version for computation of mutual information and its normalization for biomolecular sequence alignments; a workflow environment to support parameter sweeps with a biomedical application; a browser of proteomic sequences using Multi-Dimensional Scaling to map sequences to three dimensions in a way that approximately preserves distances between sequences.