Guest Editorial for the 16th Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference

The eight papers in this special section were presented at the 16th Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2018), which was held in Yokohama, Japan, 15-17 January 2018. The aim of this conference is to provide an international forum for researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners to share their knowledge and ideas of how to surf the tidal wave of information in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology.