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The growth in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology fields over the last few years has been remarkable and the trend is to increase its pace. In fact, the need for computational techniques that can efficiently handle the huge amounts of data produced by the new experimental techniques in Biology is still increasing driven by new advances in Next Generation Sequencing, several types of the so called omics data and image acquisition, just to name a few. The analysis of the datasets that produces and its integration call for new algorithms and approaches from fields such as Databases, Statistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Optimization, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Within this scenario of increasing data availability, Systems Biology has also been emerging as an alternative to the reductionist view that dominated biological research in the last decades. Indeed, Biology is more and more a science of information requiring tools from the computational sciences. In the last few years, we have seen the surge of a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists that have a strong background in the biological and computational sciences. In this context, the interaction of researchers from different scientific fields is, more than ever, of foremost importance boosting the research efforts in the field and contributing to the education of a new generation of Bioinformatics scientists. PACBB‘11 hopes to contribute to this effort promoting this fruitful interaction. PACBB'11 technical program included 50 papers from a submission pool of 78 papers spanning many different sub-fields in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Therefore, the conference will certainly have promoted the interaction of scientists from diverse research groups and with a distinct background (computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists). The scientific content will certainly be challenging andwill promote the improvement of the work that is being developed by each of the participants.

An accurate description of current scientific developments in the field of bioinformatics and computational implementation is presented by research of the BioSapiens Network of Excellence. Bioinformatics is essential for annotating the structure and function of genes, proteins and the analysis of complete genomes and to molecular biology and biochemistry. Included is an overview of bioinformatics, the full spectrum of genome annotation approaches including; genome analysis and gene prediction, gene regulation analysis and expression, genome variation and QTL analysis, large scale protein annotation of function and structure, annotation and prediction of protein interactions, and the organization and annotation of molecular networks and biochemical pathways. Also covered is a technical framework to organize and represent genome data using the DAS technology and work in the annotation of two large genomic sets: HIV/HCV viral genomes and splicing alternatives potentially encoded in 1% of the human genome.

During the last decade a wealth of new data has arisen from the use of new fluorescent labelling techniques and the sequencing of whole microbial genomes. One important conclusion from these data is that bacterial cells are much more structured than previously thought. The wall and the outer membrane contain topological domains, some proteins localize or move in specific patterns inside the cells, and some genes appear clustered in the chromosome and form conserved evolutionary units. Many of these structures are related to the cell cycle and to the process of cell morphogenesis, two processes that are themselves related to each other. From these observations the dcw gene cluster appears as a phylogenetic trait that is mainly conserved in bacilli. Molecules in Time and Space reviews the data on the formation of subcellular patterns or structures in bacteria, presents observations and hypotheses on the establishment and the maintenance of cell shape, and on the organization of genetic information in the chromosome.