Guest Editors' introduction to the special section on bioinformatics research and applications

This special section includes a selection of papers presented at the Eighth International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Application (ISBRA), which was held in Dallas, Texas, on 21-23 May 2012. 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 2012, 66 papers were submitted in response to the call for papers, out of which 26 papers appeared in the ISBRA proceedings published as volume 7292 of Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series. Extended versions of nine symposium papers were invited and accepted for publication in this special section following a rigorous review process. The selected papers cover a broad range of bioinformatics topics, including biological networks, computational complexity of problems in structural biology and genomics, and phylogenetic inference and analysis. Herein, we briefly introduce each of them.