Novel Computing Technologies for Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics

In the past, many computing technologies have been proposed and utilized to accelerate biologists/chemists to analyze biological and chemical data, such as homology detection, evolutionary analysis, function prediction, computer-aided drug design, and cheminformatics. Leveraging a power of these technologies, a lot of tools and services are valuable for biologists/chemists to efficiently analyze large-scale and complicated data. However, today's data is being generated and collected at an incredible scale, the buzzword “big data.” For instance, an individual laboratory can generate terabase scales of DNA and RNA sequencing data within a day by next-generation sequencing technologies. It is difficult to manage and process big biological and chemical data using conventional methods due to not only their size but also their complexity. It requires entirely different thoughts, while the major obstacle could be the complexity, size, or integration of various data sources. These barriers spur the revolutions of both storage and computing technologies whereby the developed tool and service can be highly scalable, totally reliable, more elastic, and so on. Therefore, the computing technologies required to maintain, process, and integrate the large amounts of data are beyond the reach of small laboratories and introduce serious challenges even for large institutes. Success at the bioinformatics and cheminformatics fields will heavily rely on an ability to explain these large-scale and great diversification data, which encourage biologists/chemists to adopt novel computing technologies. The research papers selected for this special issue represent recent progresses in the aspects, including theoretical studies, practical applications, novel strategies and framework, high performance computing technologies, method and algorithm improvement, and review. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state of-the-art technologies in the field but also stimulate future research for Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics.