Overview
The growth in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology fields in recent years has been remarkable, and the pace is increasing. In fact, the need for computational techniques to efficiently handle the huge amounts of data produced by new experimental techniques in Biology is growing, driven by new advances in Next Generation Sequencing, several types of the so-called omics data and image acquisition, and more. Data analysis and integration call for new algorithms and approaches from fields such as Databases, Statistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Optimization, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this scenario of increasing data availability, Systems Biology has emerged as an alternative to the reductionist view that previously dominated biological research. Indeed, Biology has become 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. 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'13 supports this need with a technical program that included 19 papers from a submission pool of 32 papers spanning many different sub-fields in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The conference promoted the interaction of scientists from diverse research groups and with distinct backgrounds (computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists). The scientific content will certainly be challenging and promote the improvement of the work being developed by each participant.\xa0
