ISMB/ECCB 2017 proceedings

The 25th Annual Conference Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held jointly with the 16th annual European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), took place in Prague, Czech Republic, July 21–25, 2017 (http://www.iscb.org/ ismbeccb2017). This special issue of Bioinformatics serves as the proceedings for this official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB, http://www.iscb.org/). The year 2017 was inaugural for a new program format introducing the ISCB Communities of Special Interest (COSIs) as scientific themes within the conference. The 12 COSIs presenting at ISMB/ECCB 2017 (Table 1) had previously organized the preconference Special Interest Group meetings. This year, the program incorporated COSI sessions including proceedings, highlights (previously published research), and late-breaking research talks in addition to special sessions, workshop, posters and other scientific talks submitted directly to ISMB/ECCB. ISMB/ECCB is the leading international forum in the field for presenting new methods and research results and for facilitating discussions at all levels of expertise. The 45 papers in this volume were selected from 279 original submissions, resulting in an acceptance rate of 16%. Submitted papers accumulated 3.2 reviews on average. The review process included 208 expert reviewers (with some reviewers working for more than one COSI) led by 42 Area Chairs (Table 1) to produce 899 reviews. The Area Chairs were appointed