Preface

The big news this year was the completion of the draft copy of the DNA sequence of the human genome, which is approximately the thirty-fifth genome to be finished. It seems appropriate somehow that the completion of the human genome, the eleventh meeting of the Genome Informatics Workshop (GIW 2000) and the start of the new millennium are all concurrent. The ten previous GIWs, which started in 1990, have been a prelude to this moment. Indeed, genome informatics has moved from concept to reality during the span of these workshops.
This volume of Genome Informatics is edited from papers presented at Yebisu Garden Place in Tokyo, Japan, from December 18-19, 2000. The program committee of GIW 2000 received 33 papers for oral presentation, 114 poster presentations and 5 software demonstrations. Each submitted paper was considered by at least 3 members of the program committee. Based on the reports from the committee members, the 20 papers in this volume were accepted for presentation at the workshop. In addition, the poster presentations and software demonstrations were reviewed by the editors (A. Keith Dunker, Akihiko Konagaya, Satoru Myano, and Toshihisa Takagi) for relevance.
In addition to the papers, poster presentations and software demonstrations, this book also contains abstracts from the two invited speakers who were chosen to celebrate the transition to the genome informatics era: Gene Myers of Celera Genomics, who will speak on Whole Genome Assemblies of the Drosophila and Human Genome, and Shigeyuki Yokoyama, of RIKEN & University of Tokyo, who will discuss the RIKEN Structural Genomics Initiative.
Please note that electronic version of Genome Informatics 2000 will be available from http://www.jsbi.org/journal.html. Also noteworthy is that this series will soon be indexed by Medline and therefore will be accessible via PubMed.
We look forward to a full and interesting workshop. If you are reading this while not attending GIW 2000, we ask you to make your plans now to kick off the new millennium with us in 2001.

A. Keith Dunker
Akihiko Konagaya
Program Committee Co-chairs