For the past twenty-six years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2012 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and is hosted by COSBI at Riva del Garda Congress Center, Italy.

The track aims at proposing a multi-sides perspective to computational biology, bioinformatics and theoretical systems biology. All these three areas involve the development and application of analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological sciences. Currently, the field of application of mathematical and computer science investigation methods to the life sciences is not limited to theoretical modeling in biochemistry, molecular biology and epidemiological biomathematics. Now bioinformatics and computational biology extend also to larger scale systems like ecological systems and include more applicative fields such as pharmacology, medicine, clinical trials design, healthcare and environment. Three ad-hoc topics are added to the more traditional topics of Bio-Track of ACM. These topics are: (i) stochastic ecosystem models, (ii) parallel interacting processes in ecology and (iii) hierarchical modeling at several organizational levels (show/hide more details).

The track would like to encourage the exchange and the sharing of experiences and research results about the more modern applicative aspects of bioinformatics: pharmacy and environment. An emerging field for widening the scope of bioinformatics is eco-informatics. Novel journals and conferences focus on the challenges ecological complexity raises and the novel ways how ecologists and environmental scientists look at nature. However systems ecology is an old and classical research line, which can be furthered advanced and updated by modern bioinformatics. Larger databases and novel methods meet old and classical problems in order to better understand patterns and processes in complex ecological systems. Three ad-hoc topics are added to the more traditional topics of Bio-Track of ACM.

The disciplines that join their efforts to advance the state of the art in bioinformatics and computational biology are computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, ecology, pathology, immunology and neuroscience. The industries potentially interested in the advancement of bioinformatics and computational biology are: biotechnology, pharmaceutics, medicine, clinical practice, nutrition and environment. From this perspective, the main objective of the Bioinformatics Track of SAC ACM 2012 is to propose a set of topics that can bring together academic and government scientists, lead engineers, industry researchers and scholar students proposing the recent advancement in their specific topics in the areas of bioinformatics and computational biology with a focus on the applicative domains of these disciplines.

• Data visualization and visual analytics
• Databases and data Integration
• Databases and ontologies
• DNA assembly, clustering and mapping
• Drug design
• Drug targeting
• Errors and inconsistencies in biological databases
• Evolution and phylogenetics
• Gene expression and regulation from microarray data
• Gene identification and annotation
• Gene networks
• Genomes and protein analysis
• High-performance bio-computing
• In silico clinical trials
• Integrative approaches for drug design
• Biological network inference
• Integrative data and text mining approaches
• Laboratory information management systems in biology
• Machine learning and data integration in life sciences
• Mining integrated life sciences data
• Model driven analysis of biological systems
• Molecular databases and data warehouses
• Molecular modeling and simulation
• Molecular sequence analysis
• Network analysis
• Parallel architectures and algorithms for biological applications
• Pathways, networks, systems biology
• Pattern discovery and classification
• Pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics modeling
• Phylogeny reconstruction algorithms
• Population genetics
• Prediction and integration of metabolic and regulatory networks
• Protein, RNA and DNA structure and function
• Protein interactions and molecular networks
• Protein structure prediction and modeling
• Protein-protein interactions
• Proteomics
• Quality and consistency of biological ontologies
• Query processing and optimization for biological data
• Recognition of genes and regulatory elements
• RNA and protein structure prediction
• Semantic web for the life sciences
• Sequence analysis and alignment
• Sequence assembly
• SNPs and haplotyping
• Stochastic ecosystem models
• Parallel and interacting processes in ecology
• Hierarchical modeling at several organizational levels
• Structural and functional genomics
• Structural bioinformatics
• System biology and modeling
• System prototypes for biology
• Text mining
• Therapeutic targets discovery
• Tool integration and workflow systems
• Transcriptomics
• Virtual cell