Computational Biology has experienced exceptional growth in the past years.
Computational Biology is an interdisciplinary field that aims at generating
new biological insights from genomic, proteomic and other novel molecular data
with current-day and innovative informatics methods. The field has spawned specially
targeted journals and results are also being published in journals targeted
towards the biological sciences. By inviting submissions from Computational
Biology, the Journal of the ACM manifests its commitment to interdisciplinary
aspects of informatics.
Computational Biology offers fundamental challenges to the analysis of biological data for instance: New methods of pattern recognition, modeling and simulation have to be developed and applied in order to elicit biologically relevant signals in generally noisy biological data. Approaches to systematic validation of the methods have to be brought forward in the face of incomplete understanding such fundamental concepts to biology as evolution or free energy. Since cost functions in computational biology are inherently inaccurate, confidence estimates are very helpful if computer predictions are to be interpreted. The development of the definition and algorithmic solution of a problem tend to go hand in hand, rather than the algorithm development following the definition of the problem. "Protein function" is a good example for a central term in the field that is developing as the field progresses. Information integration is a central issue since biological signals are often weak and can only be separated from background noise by using many different data sources.
JACM invites Computational Biology papers, especially those that address methodical issues like the ones mentioned above. Submissions should contain a clear and concise description of the biological background and the goal to be achieved, a definition of the problem statement, a presentation of an original contribution to insight into or a solution of the problem, and the description of a validation on artificial and/or biological data. It has to be argued especially if a paper does not contain substantial validation on biological data. Finally, the relevance of the contribution has to be argued in terms of other related work in the literature spanning the fields of computer science, computational biology and biology.
Submissions may be reviewed by computer scientists, computational biologists and biologists.