Biological and biomedical research are increasingly driven by experimental techniques that
challenge our ability to analyse process and extract meaningful knowledge from the underlying
data. The impressive capabilities of next generation sequencing technologies together with
novel and ever evolving distinct types of omics data technologies have put an increasingly
complex set of challenges for the growing fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
The analysis of the datasets produced and their integration call for new algorithms and
approaches from fields such as Databases Statistics Data Mining Machine Learning
Optimization Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Clearly Biology is more and more a
science of information requiring tools from the computational sciences. In the last few years
we have seen the surge of a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists thathave a strong
background in the biological and computational sciences. In this context the interaction of
researchers from different scientific fields is more than ever of foremost importance
boosting the research efforts in the field and contributing to the education of a new
generation of Bioinformatics scientists. PACBB'16 hopes to contribute to this effort promoting
this fruitful interaction. PACBB'16 technical program included 21 papers spanning many
different sub-fields in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Therefore the conference
will certainly promote the interaction of scientists from diverse research groups and with a
distinct background (computer scientists mathematicians biologists). The scientific content
will certainly be challenging and will promote the improvement of the work being developed by
each of the participants.
