Most research areas of bioinformatics, computational biology and medical informatics have experienced significant advances in recent years driven by computational techniques in bioinformatics. The 9th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB) will provide an utmost venue for researchers and practitioners in bioinformatics to present and publish their research results and techniques. Bioinformatics and computational biology continue to be a vibrant research area with broadening applications and new emerging challenges. BICOB-2017 seeks original and high quality papers in the fields of bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology, medical informatics and the related areas. The conference includes a Best Paper Award to be given during the conference banquet. We also encourage work in progress and research results in the emerging and evolutionary computational areas. Work in the computational methods related to, or with application in, bioinformatics is also encouraged including: computational intelligence and its application in bioinformatics, bio-data mining and text mining, evolutionary algorithms, nature-inspired computation, machine learning and bio-NLP, biomedical ontology, biomathematics, modeling and simulation, pattern recognition, data visualization, biostatistics. The topics of interest include (and are not limited to):

(i) Genome analysis: Genome assembly, Next-Gen genomics and metagenomics, genome and chromosome annotation, gene finding, alternative splicing, EST analysis and comparative genomics.
(ii) Sequence analysis: Multiple sequence alignment, sequence search and clustering, next generation sequencing NGS, function prediction, motif discovery, functional site recognition in protein, RNA and DNA sequences.
(iii) Phylogenetics: Phylogeny estimation, models of evolution, comparative biological methods, population genetics.
(iv) Structural Bioinformatics: Structure matching, prediction, analysis and comparison; methods and tools for docking; protein design.
(v) Analysis of high-throughput biological data: Microarrays (nucleic acid, protein, array CGH, genome tiling, and other arrays), EST, SAGE, MPSS, proteomics, mass spectrometry. Also, query languages, interoperability, bio-ontology and bio-data mining.
(vi) Genetics and population analysis: Linkage analysis, association analysis, population simulation, haplotyping, marker discovery, genotype calling.
(vii) Systems biology: Systems approaches to molecular biology, multiscale modeling, pathways, gene networks, transcriptomics - microarray data analysis, proteomics, epigenomics.
(viii)Healthcare Informatics: healthcare data acquisition, analysis and mining. Clinical decision support systems, and healthcare information systems.
(ix) Computational Proteomics: Filtering and indexing sequence databases, Peptide quantification and identification, Genome annotations via mass spectrometry, Identification of post-translational modifications, Structural genomics via mass spectrometry, Protein-protein interactions, Computational approaches to analysis of large scale Mass spectrometry data, Exploration and visualization of proteomic data, Data models and integration for proteomics and genomics, Querying and retrieval of proteomics and genomics data etc.

Submission Procedures
Papers will be accepted only by electronic submission (in PDF format). A full paper, including title, author's name(s) and affiliation, mailing address, telephone, fax and email of the principal author, should be submitted by October 31, 2016 at the following web site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bicob2017. The submitted manuscript should closely reflect the final paper as it will appear in the Proceedings which will be a maximum of 6 pages (+2 pages with additional page charge). A double-column format will be used; see template:http://www.isca-hq.org/sample-isca-manuscript-format.pdf. If you encounter any difficulties during submission or if you require further information, please contact: isca@ipass.net.

Journal Publication
Authors of selected papers in BICOB-2017 will be invited to submit extended version of their papers for possible publication in the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB).

Indexing
Accepted papers will be indexed in Scopus, EI, and INSPEC, and submitted to DBLP for indexing. All BICOB-2017 Proceedings papers will be accessible and available online at www.seachDL.org and also will appear in Google scholar full text.

Conference Chair
Hisham Al-Mubaid
University of Houston - Clear Lake, Houston, USA
+1 (281) 283-3802
Hisham@uhcl.edu

Program Co-Chair
Oliver Eulenstein
Iowa State University, USA
+1 (515) 294-2407
oeulenst@iastate.edu

Program Co-Chair
Qin Ding
East Carolina University, USA
+1 (252) 328-9686
dingq@ecu.edu

Publicity Chair
Nurit Haspel
University of Massachusetts Boston, USA
+1 (617) 287-6414
nurit.haspel@umb.edu