Introduction

The Workshop on Computational Methods in Bioinformatics was held in Covilhã between the 5th and 8th December 2005, as part of the 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

The success of bioinformatics in recent years has been prompted by research in molecular biology and molecular medicine in initiatives like the human genome project. These initiatives gave rise to an exponential increase in the volume and diversification of data, including protein and gene data, nucleotide sequences and biomedical literature. The accumulation and exploitation of large-scale data bases prompts for new computational technology and for research into these issues. In this context, many widely successful computational models and tools used by biologists in these initiatives, such as clustering and classification methods for gene expression data, are based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Hence, this workshop brought the opportunity to discuss applications of AI with an interdisciplinary character, exploring the interactions between sub-areas of AI and Bioinformatics.