Editorial message: special track on bioinformatics

Advances in bioinformatics are providing the foundations for the convergence of agribusiness, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, computing and other fields, into what promises to be the largest industry in the world, the life sciences industry. Much of the information to support biology research is available from online databases in a multitude of formats. The challenge is to obtain information and knowledge from these databases using innovative computational approaches to predict and explain phenomena in many application fields. One example of this computational challenge is to identify 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 identifying conserved genomes and pathways across several species at a high level, we hope to understand how stable biological systems have evolved. Over the last few years, very high throughput techniques, such as microarray analysis, have provided many insights into genomes, metabolmes and transcriptomes and into cellular function. These data are now increasingly complemented by mass spectrometry technology, providing insights into proteomes. This computational analysis technique poses many new challenges.