Abstract
This volume contains the second half of a selected subset of articles that appeared in the 24th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB). RECOMB 2020 was originally scheduled to be held in Padua, Italy, in May 2020, but was forced to move online due to the COVID-19 pandemic at a rescheduled time of June 22–25, 2020. Despite the challenges, the meeting proved a resounding success, attracting >4000 online attendees. This year, 37 articles were selected from 206 submissions for presentation and incorporation in the RECOMB 2020 proceedings. Each of these 37 articles was reviewed by at least three Program Committee (PC) members, often with the help of additional external reviewers. After initial reviews, articles were opened to discussion among the PC reviewers and PC chair before final decisions were made. Following a long tradition, accepted articles were invited for submission to a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology, as well as having the new option of submitting a companion short software article. Ten extended proceedings articles and two software articles were ultimately accepted for this two-volume special issue, in addition to one extended proceedings article carried over from a prior RECOMB.
The success of RECOMB 2020 depended on the hard work and dedication of many colleagues. I would like to thank the members of the PC and the external reviewers, whose efforts and expertise ensured a high-quality conference program and Journal of Computational Biology special issue. I am especially grateful to the RECOMB 2020 Organizing Committee and particularly Conference Chair Fabio Vandin from the University of Padua, who will remain as Conference Chair when RECOMB 2021 is scheduled to come to Padua for the conference's 25th anniversary. I thank the RECOMB Steering Committee and its Chair, Bonnie Berger, for extensive support throughout the review and planning process. I am also very grateful to Lenore Cowen, Program Chair of RECOMB 2019, for her plentiful advice, guidance, and sharing of resources that made a successful meeting possible. I also want to thank the chairs of the various satellite meetings that collocated with the conference: Ewa Szczurek and Iman Hajirasouliha (RECOMB—Computational Cancer Biology); Itsik Pe'er, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, and Sriram Sankararaman, Gillian Belbin (RECOMB—Genetics), and Robert Patro and Leena Salmela (RECOMB—Seq). Finally, I want to thank the many other contributors of keynote talks, highlight presentations, and posters and the numerous attendees who made RECOMB 2020 so memorable and successful.
The RECOMB conference has celebrated 24 illustrious years since Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner, and Michael Waterman first had the vision to start this conference series back in 1997, remaining one of the premiere meetings of the world computational biology community. RECOMB 2020 proved an unusual challenge, like so much in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, but ultimately showed the resilience of our community in offering one of the most technically impressive and widely attended meetings the computational biology research community has ever seen. We look forward to many more successful years of RECOMB!