Guest Editor Preface: Plant & Animal Genome (PAG) Meeting Bioinformatics Session Paper Competition

Abstract

In the field of science, not all experiments take place in the laboratory. In some cases, experiments can be organizational to explore a new way of doing things. Scientific workshops at the annual Plant & Animal Genome (PAG) conference in San Diego have traditionally followed a format of coordinator-invited presentations. Based on feedback from PAG meeting attendees in 2003 concerning the meeting’s bioinformatics workshops and inspired by the paper-driven format of other international bioinformatics meetings, a different workshop format for bioinformatics was proposed for 2004: an invited keynote speaker presenting a review of specified methodology in the field, followed by presentation of selected papers from a first ever PAG bioinformatics paper competition. The theme of the competitive papers was requested to be ‘bioinformatics applied to answer specific plant and/or animal genome research questions’. As an added incentive for prospective authors, the workshop organizer negotiated with Bioinformatics, to publish the keynote review paper and the five selected papers chosen by a formal process of peer review. I am now pleased to introduce these keynote and five selected papers of the competition, published in this special section of Bioinformatics: