INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS IN BIOINFORMATICS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTA

The advancement of high-throughput technologies that generate large scale biological data, as well as the development of related computational tools, has united global efforts and brought revolutionary changes to the research of biology during the last decade. Nowadays, biologists work with scientists and engineers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to unravel how complex biological systems work. Interdisciplinary Research and Applications in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Environmental Sciences is a collection of cutting-edge research papers in the field of computational and systems biology contributed by leading researchers from across the globe. The studies range from the atomic/molecular level to the genomic level and present a wide spectrum of important biological problems and applications. It is a must-read for researchers in a broad range of disciplines, including computer science, chemistry, physics, math and statistics, and biological sciences.

Limin Angela Liu, PhD, obtained her BSc degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing and her PhD degree from Carnegie Mellon University, USA. After postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University, USA, she became Associate Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her recent work includes the establishment of an ab initio method for the prediction of transcription factor binding sites and a novel "tethered-hopping model" for describing the effects of protein-protein interactions on the formation and stability of ternary protein-DNA complexes.

Dongqing Wei, PhD, is the acting head of the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, the editor-in-Chief of the journal "Interdisciplinary Sciences - Computational Life Sciences", and the chairman of the International Association of Scientists in the Interdisciplinary Areas (IASIA). Prof. Wei's research is in the general area of structural bioinformatics. He is best known for his ground-breaking work on theory of complicated liquids. He, along with Prof. Gren Patey, has found that strongly interacting dipolar spheres can form a ferroelectric nematic phase. This was the first demonstration that dipolar forces alone can create an orientationally ordered liquid state. It is also the first time that the existence of a ferroelectric nematic phase has been established for a model liquid. This discovery solved a long standing problem in theoretical physics, and created a new direction in search for new liquid crystal materials (Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 2043, 1992, cited about 180 times). In recent years, Prof. Wei has developed tools of molecular simulation and applied them to study biological systems with relevance to computer-aided drug design and structural biology. With more than 150 journal papers and greater than 2000 citations (Science Citation Index), he is becoming a leading figure in the area of structural bioinformatics.

Yixue Li, PhD, was born in Xinjiang, China. Currently, he is the director in Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology, vice director and a full research professor of Key Laboratory of Systems Biology at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Li received his BSc. and Msc. degrees in theoretical physics from Xinjiang University, China, in 1982 and 1987, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1996. After Dr. Li got his Ph.D. degree he worked as a bioinformatics research staff in European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) from 1997-2000, and came back to Shanghai, China in the middle of 2000. Dr.Li's research interests include bioinformatics, systems biology and computational biology. Dr. Li has published more than 100 journal papers in various international scientific journals, such as Science, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, PNAS, Bioinformatics, NAR, Plos Computational Biology, Plos One, Molecular Systems Biology, Molecular Cellular Proteomics, Oncogene, BMC Bioinformatics, Genome Biology, etc., and his research results have been cited by more than 1500 researchers worldwide in books, theses, journal and conference papers. Dr. Li has served as an editorial board member for 5 scientific journals.