Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Bioinformatics Research and Applications

This special issue includes a selection of papers presented at the $12^{th}$ International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Application (ISBRA), which was held at Belorussian State University in Minsk, Belarus on June 5–8, 2016. The ISBRA symposium provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. In 2016, 77 papers were submitted in response to the call for papers, out of which 22 extended abstracts appeared in the ISBRA proceedings published as volume 9683 of Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series.