Preface: Special RECOMB 2001 Issue

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Computational Biology contains a selection of papers that were presented at the Fifth Annual International Conference on Computational Biology RECOMB 2001, held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on April 22–25, 2001. The RECOMB series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner, and Michael Waterman. RECOMB ’97 was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, RECOMB ’98 was held in New York City, RECOMB ’99 took place in Lyon, France, and RECOMB 2000 was held in Tokyo, Japan. Selections of papers from these conferences appeared in Volume 4, Number 3–4; Volume 5, Number 3; Volume 6, Number 3–4; and Volume 7, Number 3–4. The call for papers for RECOMB 2001 gave rise to 128 submissions, out of which the program committee selected 35 papers to be presented at the conference. The extended abstracts of all accepted papers were published in the Proceedings of RECOMB 2001 (ACM Press). Full versions of 17 papers are contained in this volume. RECOMB 2001 had nine invited speakers: Mark Adams (Celera Genomics, Rockville, Maryland), Roger Brent (Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley, California), George Church (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts), Franz Lang (Universite de Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Klaus Lindpaintner (HoffmannLa Roche, Basel, Switzerland), Yvonne Martin (Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, Illinois), Mark Ptashne (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York), Philip Sharp (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Mathias Wilm (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany). The Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture was given by George Church. The Distinguished Biology Lecture was given by Philip Sharp. The Distinguished New Technologies Lecture was given by Mark Adams. The program committee consisted of Steve Bryant, Philipp Bucher, Gordon Crippen, Antoine Danchin, Sridhar Hannenhalli, David Haussler, Liisa Holm, Sorin Istrail, Minoru Kanehisa, Richard Karp, Thomas Lengauer, Hans-Peter Lenhof, Michal Linial, Satoru Miyano, Pavel Pevzner, Isidore Rigoutsos, David Sankoff, Ron Shamir, Donna Slonim, Terry Speed, Mike Sternberg, William Taylor, Martin Vingron, Tandy Warnow, Michael Waterman and Ralf Zimmer. The RECOMB 2001 program had three components: the invited keynotes, the contributed talks, and the poster session. The lively poster session was an important ingredient of the conference program. The collection of abstracts of the accepted posters appeared as a book, Currents in Computational Molecular Biology 2001, Nadia El-Mabrouk, Thomas Lengauer, David Sankoff, eds., that was published by Les Publications CRM, Montreal, Canada. The senior supporters for RECOMB 2001 included the governmental agencies US Department of Energy and US National Science Foundation, the Quebec Ministere de l’Industrie et du Commerce, the Centre de recherches mathematiques at Universite de Montreal, and the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), as well as the companies Celera Genomics, Compaq, and Lion Bioscience. Additional support came from the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the Centre de recherche en calcul applique (CERCA) in Montreal, and the companies Aventis Pharma and SmithKline Beecham. The conference was organized by the Universite de Montreal which also supported the conference in many ways. David Sankoff headed the local organization. The steering committee for the RECOMB conference series consists of Sorin Istrail, General Vice-Chair (Celera Genomics), Richard Karp (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas Lengauer (Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrucken, Germany), Pavel Pevzner, General Chair (University of California,