These two issues contain a selected subset of the papers presented at RECOMB 2014, the 18th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA during April 2–5, 2014. The RECOMB conference series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner, and Michael Waterman. RECOMB 2014 was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. This year, 35 papers were accepted for presentation at RECOMB 2014 by the Program Committee (PC) out of 154 submissions. Each submission was assigned to at least three PC members and reviewed with the help of many external reviewers. Following the initial reviews, there was an extensive discussion of the submissions among the members of the PC, leading to the final decisions. Continuing an 18-year tradition, accepted papers were then invited for submission to two special issues of the Journal of Computational Biology (JCB), the official journal of RECOMB. The submissions to the special issues went through an additional round of reviewing prior to publication.
I would like to thank the members of the Program Committee and the external reviewers, who helped form a high-quality conference program and special issue selection, Russell Schwartz and Panayiotis (Takis) Benos for the smooth cooperation regarding various organization details, Martin Vingron (Chair of the Steering Committee), Yehuda Afek (Tel Aviv University), Ron Shamir and Benny Chor (PC Chairs of RECOMB 2000 and 2012, respectively), and Sorin Istrail and the editorial staff at JCB for numerous discussions, helpful tips, and technical support.
