Editorial message: special track on bioinformatics

ABSTRACT

Advances in bioinformatics are providing the foundations for the convergence of agribusiness, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and computing into what promises to be the largest industry in the world, the life sciences industry. A large part of the information to support biology research is available on large number of heterogeneous databases in both structured and unstructured formats. The challenge is to obtain information and knowledge from these databases using innovative computational approaches to support and promote biomedical research. One example of such a computational challenge is in identifying biological pathways using data, information, and knowledge scattered over heterogeneous databases. Computational tools using system-theoretic approaches are needed to model metabolic pathways, signal-transduction pathways, genetic regulatory circuits and biological systems modeling. By comparing the genomes and pathways of several species at a high level, we hope to understand how stable biological systems have evolved. Over the last few years, microarray data have provided many insights into the transcriptome and into cellular function. These data are now increasingly complemented by mass spectrometry data of the proteome, whose analysis poses new computational challenges.