Editorial Free

This special issue of Bioinformatics contains the proceedings of the joint meeting of the 7th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) and the 5th Meeting of the Bioinformatics Italian Society (BITS). The conference was held from September 22 to 26 in the Congress Center of Cagliari, Italy.

ECCB is the major European conference in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. It covers computational methods aimed at addressing key issues in molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and molecular medicine. Past editions of ECCB have been held in Vienna (AT), Eilat (IL), Madrid (ES), Glasgow (UK), Paris (F) and Saarbrüken (D).

ECCB owes its success to the hard and diligent work of its steering committee and of the many scientists who volunteer to manage and review the papers submitted to the conference.

The aim of the conference is to provide a scientific forum for discussing the issues and advances in computational biology. It is also an opportunity for young scientists to meet with their peers, present their results and, possibly, to build long-lasting scientific relationships. Encouraging the participation of young scientists was one of our aims in this conference and we succeeded, thanks to the financial help of the International Society for Computational Biology and the BioSapiens and Embrace Networks of Excellence (funded by the European Committee); and thanks to the Sapienza University of Rome and to the Regione Sardegna. All these Institutions offered travel support to young applicants. Further support came from the 2006 ECCB meeting's organizers in Eilat. We also offered the option for younger scientists to volunteer for some technical tasks during the meeting in exchange for travel support. Taking advantage of all these opportunities, we were able to provide support to about half of the 170 fellowship applicants. They come from all over the world and were selected by a committee chaired by myself.

Even though we were rather successful in raising funds for supporting young people, half of the applicants had to be turned down and this is, of course, disappointing both for them and for us. We ask for the understanding of the unsuccessful applicants and would like to stress that the selection was made necessary by the limited available resources and was based on a (necessarily subjective) evaluation of the extent to which the participation to the meeting could represent an important opportunity for the prosecution of the applicant's future career.

Six keynote speakers were invited to present their latest results at the conference. Eric Davidson (California Institute of Technology, USA) talked about the global logic of development, while the BITS “Giuliano Preparata” lecture of Eske Willerslev (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) was focused on ancient DNA. Protein networks and interactions were discussed by Trey Ideker (University of California, San Diego, USA) and Mark Vidal (Harvard Medical School, USA) in the context of their role in diseases, by Christine Orengo (University College London, UK) in terms of their usefulness for function prediction and by Alfonso Valencia (Spanish National Cancer Research Center, Spain) from an evolutionary perspective in his EMBO lecture.

The scientific sessions of this year's conference covered most of the many diverse areas of bioinformatics and computational biology that collectively contribute to a better understanding of life at a molecular and systems level. They went from Biological Databases to Genomes and protein analysis, from Algorithms and phylogeny to Transcriptomics, pathways and interactions, from Structural bioinformatics to Proteomics, from Text mining to Systems biology and Bioinformatics for diseases.

Papers were submitted in all these categories and two senior editors led each of the areas. The papers presented at the conference and included in this special issue were selected by a Programme Committtee formed by 143 reviewers and 106 co-reviewers. We received 186 submissions of which 36 papers (19%) were accepted. The area chairs distributed the papers among the referees within each area. Each paper was assigned to three reviewers and we received three reports for most of the papers, with a few cases where we were only able to secure two referee reports. The whole process was assisted by CyberChair, an automated system for paper submission and reviewing. The same system was used for discussing papers in cases where the reviewers had different opinions about the relevance and/or quality of the contribution. Only after a consensus was reached by all the reviewers, a decision was made about the paper.

Poster submission started immediately after closing the reviewing process in order to give a chance to authors of rejected papers to resubmit them as posters. We received 350 posters, that were reviewed by Domenico Cozzetto and myself, and were displayed during the whole conference. Time was allocated during the meeting to view the posters and discuss with the authors. There were also several commercial and non-commercial exhibits and software demonstrations.

The Italian Bioinformatics Society awards a prize for the best Italian PhD thesis in Bioinformatics through an open call followed by a selection procedure by an international scientific committee. This year's awardee was invited to give a short presentation at the ECCB meeting.

We also asked Janet Thornton (EMBL-EBI, UK) to shortly introduce ELIXIR, a European ESFRI Project whose mission is to construct and operate a sustainable infrastructure for biological information in Europe to support life science research and its translation to medicine and the environment, the bio-industries and society.

The program included four tutorials: ‘From sequence to structure and function: structural modeling of proteins and protein–DNA complexes by comparative methods’ organized by Jan Kosinski (International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, PL), ‘Microarray data analysis and quality assessment, ArrayExpress and BioConductor’ organized by Audrey Kauffmann and Gabriella Rustici (EMBL-EBI, UK), ‘Exploration and analysis of Protein–Protein Interactions (PPIs)’ organized by Javier De Las Rivas (Cancer Research Center, ES) and ‘Interoperability of bioinformatics software and databases’ organized by Gert Vriend (CMBI, NL).

There were two workshops ‘Annotation, interpretation and management of Mutations (AIMM): What makes sense?’ moderated by C. Baker (Institute for Infocomm Research, SG) and D. Rebholz-Schuhmann (EMBL-EBI, UK), and ‘Networks: Theory and Practice in Biology’ moderated by Diego Di Bernardo (TIGEM, I).

It is our pleasure to thank all the people and organizations that made the event possible. The list of sponsors and Institutions is included in this issue. We also received support from additional Institutions and Companies after writing this page, they are all listed in the conference website (http://www.eccb08.org).

Sardegna Ricerche, the regional agency for research in Sardinia, not only invited all the participants to a buffet lunch in their beautiful premises, but also contributed to the success of the event by sharing with us its expertise in organizing scientific events in the island.

The reviewers and the area chairs did a great job, both in terms of quantity and quality and we were able to keep each and every deadline, thanks to their commitment and timeliness. Special thanks go to the steering committee for its useful and insightful advices, and to the Local Organizing Committee, in particular to Paolo Marcatili who handled all the issues related to the website of the conference, to Domenico Cozzetto who managed the whole abstract submission and reviewing and who, together with Domenico Raimondo and Loredana Le Pera helped processing the fellowship applications. I would also like to express my gratitude to all the other members of my group, especially to Emanuela Giombini and Allegra Via, who took care of the many other issues that arose in the process of organizing the conference. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the help and suggestions of Hershel Shafer and Thomas Lengauer from their experience in organizing ECCB meetings in the past.

We would like to thank Maxine Jeffrey and Oxford University Press production team for their helpful assistance in the production of this proceeding issue.

The editors thank Andrei Voronkov for the EasyChair system and for being extremely helpful during the initial phase of the system setup. We are also grateful to our professional meeting organizers, Simona Casu, Silvia Campagna, and to the meeting manager Maria Teresa Sotgiu from the Kassiopea group.

Many other people put effort in the organization of the event and, although we cannot name them all, they all contributed to the success of the conference together with the breathtaking beauty of the Sardinia Island and the hospitality of its people.

Anna Tramontano

On behalf of the ECCB'08 steering committee