The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) is multidisciplinary conference covering current research in the theory and practice of computational methods as applied to significant biological problems. PSB 2015 - 2019 will be the 20th to 24th meeting of this series. Each March, participants propose sessions and workshops for the PSB meeting to be held the following January. In the face of stiff competition, 5 to 6 sessions and 2 to 4 workshops are chosen. These sessions and workshops are often organized by young scientists who are developing new research areas. Thus, PSB provides early opportunities for serious examination of emerging research areas. PSB also provides young scientists the opportunity to gain a significant career boost by this activity. Our goals are for sessions to cover emerging areas and for workshops to bring attention to very newest developments. This bottom-up, crowdsourcing approach has worked well to reveal the newest developments in this field. Each session has one high-profile speaker followed by 4 to 8 talks based on accepted papers. These papers are published in PSB proceedings, are open access, and are indexed by PubMed. Submitted papers are rigorously reviewed, with typically d 30% being accepted. First- day, session-associated tutorials provide background for the upcoming sessions. The newest- developments workshops lay the groundwork for the future. In addition, the meeting has 2 keynote speakers and a continuously running poster session. PSB has continually improved from participant feedback; specific examples of this improvement will be given. The PSB meeting is highly regarded, ranking as the 3rd best meeting in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology by Microsoft Academic Search, and the PSB Proceedings is ranked 14th among bioinformatics journals by Google Scholar Citation Statistics. The high ranking of the meeting and its proceedings attests to PSB's very significant impact. PSB continues to foster the development of computational biology and bioinformatics by providing important, critical exposure to emerging areas and thus deserves support.
Improving human health will likely require improved understanding of human DNA, which has about 3 billion units that code for more than 20,000 different proteins (with many of these proteins existing in multiple forms) and for an undetermined number of regulatory molecules. Dealing with all of these entities and their interactions requires extensive use of computer algorithms. Exchanging information about the development and optimal use of these computational biology and bioinformatics algorithms is the focus of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), which is one of the more significant scientific meetings on this topic.
