Guest editorial: Special issue on bioinformatics and computational biology

Bioinformatics and computational biology research is fundamental to our understanding of complex biological systems, impacting the science and technology of fields ranging from agricultural and environmental sciences to pharmaceutical and medical sciences. It is one of the fastest developing research fields in the last two decades. High throughput biological data that are used to provide information at molecular and genetic level are rapidly generated. Almost all research problems in biological and medical sciences nowadays are computationally hard. Computational techniques have become an indispensable tool to discover new biological insights. It has already enabled unprecedented advances in biological and medical sciences, and will continue to be a vibrant research area with broadening of computational techniques and new emerging challenges.