Fifth International Conference on Bioinformatics of Genome Regulation and Structure-BGRS'2006

This issue of the In Silico Biology journal covers the materials reported at the Fifth International Conference on Bioinformatics of Genome Regulation and Structure-BGRS’2006 (Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Russia, July 16–22, 2006; http://www.bionet.nsc.ru/meeting/bgrs2006/index.html). At the Conference, a wide range of basic issues of bioinformatics resolved by in silico methods, in conjunction with the modern experimental ones, were addressed. The issues were related to the structural-functional organization of the essential components of the living systems at the levels of genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, gene, and metabolic networks. Bioinformatics emerged over 30 years ago, in an (ongoing) endeavor to develop a quantitative framework for comparing nucleotide and protein sequences. Today, it is a vibrant multidisciplinary research area linked to the modern high-throughput biotechnical methodology. Contemporary bioinformatics embraces mathematical treatment of the data generated by biological experiments, comparative analysis of genetic macromolecules, evolutionary analysis, molecular modeling, etc. Among other things, bioinformatics is concerned with the analysis of complex biological objects such as gene and metabolic networks, computational performance of modeling and simulation tools that describe the behavior of the biological systems, and issues related to warehousing and processing of massive amounts of data generated by modern genomics and genetic epidemiology research. The materials presented by a truly interdisciplinary research community at the Conference demonstrated that the major breakthroughs resulted from synergy of methods employed in the different bioinformatics areas. It should be noted that bioinformatics is rooted in biology; and biology does not make any sense without evolution. Hence, the cornerstones of bioinformatics are comparative analysis of macromolecules and their interactions, and their manifold evolutionary aspects. The materials included in this issue emphasize the interplay of evolutionary and other bioinformatics approaches in attempt to meet and address pressing biological challenges.