This special issue contains a selected subset from the papers presented at RECOMB 2011: the 15th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology held in Vancouver, Canada, during March 28–31, 2011. The RECOMB conference series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner, and Michael Waterman. RECOMB 2011 was hosted by the Lab for Computational Biology, Simon Fraser University, and took place at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. This year, 43 papers were accepted for presentation out of 153 submissions. While the conference had a special focus on next generation sequencing and genomics, the papers published in the special issue represent a wide selection of topics from Bioinformatics.
All papers were reviewed and selected by a Program Committee (PC) assisted by a number of external reviewers. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the PC, or by external reviewers, and there was an extensive Web-based discussion over a period of two weeks, leading to the final decisions. An additional round of reviewing was done prior to publication in the special issue.
I would like to thank the Program Committee and external reviewers who helped select the high quality of papers in this volume, the RECOMB steering committee chaired by Martin Vingron, and Sorin Istrail and the editorial staff at JCB for their continued support.
