MidSouth Biology and Bioinformatics Society held its twelfth annual conference at the Little Rock Downtown Marriott and Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, Arkansas on March 13-14, 2015 (MCBIOS 2015). This year's theme was Trends in Bioinformatics. President and Conference Co-Chair this year was Cesar M. Compadre who is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). other co-chair was William Slikker Jr., the director of the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research. Conference committee members were Elizabeth Pierce, Shraddha Thakkar, Dennis Burian, Roger Perkins, Weida Tong, Mary Yang, Shweta S. Chawan, Ping Fong Jr., Galina Glazko, Mihir Jaiswal, and Paola Ordonez. Shraddha Thakkar was chosen as President-Elect for 2016-7. There were 158 registrants and a total of 141 abstracts submitted (60 oral and 81 poster presentations). Keynote speakers were: Carolina Cruz-Neira, the Director of the Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (title: The Pretty Picture: Experiencing Data Through interactive Visual Explorations); Yana Bromberg, Assistant Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University (title: Interpreting genomic data to inform pathogenesis pathways); and Jacque Fetrow, the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Richmond (title: What do all those proteins do? An approach to functionally relevant clustering the protein universe). Participants also had the opportunity to attend a special workshop on omics in bioinformatics. presenters in the workshop were Thomas Girke, Director of the Bioinformatics Facility in the Institute of Integrative Genome Biology at University of California, Riverside (title: Computational Genomics); Alexey I. Nesvizhskii, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine & Bioinformatics and Pathology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (title: Computational Proteomics); and Frank Emmert-Streib, Associate Professor at the Center for Cancer Research and Cell Biology, Queen's University Belfast (title: Computational Transcriptomics). Participants also had chance to attend pre-conference workshop on R and Bioconductor by Dr. Girke. The winners of conference awards were: Best Paper Award: Efficient experimental design for uncertainty reduction in gene regulatory networks by Roozbeh Dehghannasiri, Byung-Jun Yoon and Edward Dougherty [1] Best Oral Presentations (Post-Doctoral fellows): William S. Sanders, Ph.D., Mississippi State University Daniel Mohsenizadeh, Ph.D., Texas A&M University Hui Wen Ng, Ph.D., National Center for Toxicology Research, FDA Best Oral Presentations (students): Badri Adhikari, University of Missouri Zhaofang Li, Rush College Lauren Bright, Mississippi State University Best Poster (Computation): Mihir Jaiswal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock- 1st Place Jordyn Radke, University of Arkansas at Little Rock- 2nd Place Jundi Wang, Southern Mississippi University- 3rd Place Best Poster (Biology): Shuneize Slater(Lowe), University of Mississippi- 1st Place Lucky Ahmed, Jackson State University- 2nd Place Lisa Alley, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences- 3rd Place