Preface

This issue of Genome Informatics contains papers presented at the Seventeenth International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW 2006) held in Yokohama, Japan from December 18th to 20th, 2006.
The GIW series provides an international forum for presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology. Its scope includes biological sequence analysis, protein folding prediction, gene regulatory network, clustering algorithms, comparative genomics, and text mining.
The program committee of GIW 2006 received 45 submissions in total.Each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the program committee. Based on their reports, 26 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference. These 26 papers appear in this book and are indexed in Medline. In addition, this book contains abstracts from the three invited speakers: Yoshihide Hayashizaki of RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center, Ivo Hofacker of The University of Vienna and Limsoon Wong of National University of Singapore.The electronic versions of all these papers in this issue are freely available from the website of the Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (JSBi) (http://www.jsbi.org/jsbi_new/gioinfo.html).

Yasubumi Sakakibara
Temple Smith
GIW 2006 Program Committee Co-Chairs

Acknowledgments

First of all, we would like to thank the authors for their effort in preparing their manuscripts. We also appreciate the great efforts made by the program committee members in the reviewing process.We further acknowledge the assistance from the local organizing committee members for arranging the conference venue.Special thanks are due to the conference editorial staff for their excellent work, especially, Emi Ikeda, Hiroko Nishihata, Ayumu Saito, Kazuko Ueno, Ayako Brecht, Asako Suzuki, Seiya Imoto, Masao Nagasaki and other Miyano laboratory members.Finally, GIW 2006 would not have been possible without the support andsponsorship of JSBi,the Bioinformatics Center (Kyoto University) and the Human Genome Center (University of Tokyo).