Biology is the science of life. Research and technology in the field of biology has developed rapidly during the last two decades producing large amount of experimental data. These data should be stored and processed to acquire biological knowledge. The Human Genome Project played a central role in accelerating this development and illustrated a successful example of the power of integration of different sciences particularly information technology to achieve complex major objectives.
The interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics uses statistical, mathematical and computer sciences techniques to enable biologists to analyze and gain insight into data obtained in laboratories. Now availability of genome sequences of different organisms has revolutionized many fields of biology, including microbiology, virology, infectious disease and plant biology. In recent years, “precision medicine”, tailoring general treatments for any person based on his/her genetic profile, has become a ubiquitous ambition. The study of the health records and DNA of one million people can pave the way for precision medicine besides introducing wide range of new problems for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics and computational biology have gained noticeable attention from both academic and non-academic people during past decade in Iran. This increasing interest in the field plus the role it can play in medicine and commercializing bioinformatics require public and active communities to help people share their ideas.
Iranian Bioinformatics Society (IBIS) is a place to bring together researchers, students and interested people involved in bioinformatics research and development. The journal of Bioinformatics and Biocomputational Research (BBR) launched by IBIS, will be the first Iranian journal dedicated to this field. This new-born journal helps to bring together, in one place, related publications scattered throughout different subjects as biology, mathematics, and computer science The journal is an open access.
Along with research papers, the journal accepts reviews, applications notes, and critical comments on all topics in the scope. Publications including original data and/or new databases are also welcomed. All submitted papers are single blind-reviewed by peers.
We plan to publish two regular issues in a year. Also we will have special issues containing selected papers from prestigious conferences when opportunities arise, to reflect leading edge advances.
In order to achieve the goal of being the leading journal, the editorial board is composed of well-known professors of bioinformatics in top ranked universities and national institutes in Iran and notable members from universities and research centers worldwide.
In this inaugural issue of ‌‌‌‌BBR we bring you five research papers on different subjects: gene regulatory network reconstruction, Bayesian approaches for identifying differentially expressed genes, analysis of natural disulfide bridges in proteins, the application of PCA to Bayesian network structure, and linear time DNA algorithm to solve 0/1 Knapsack. In addition this issue has a review paper on bioinformatics and its role in biology.