Guest Editor Preface

In the field of science, not all experiments take place in the laboratory. In some cases, experiments can be organizational to explore a new way of doing things. Scientific workshops at the annual Plant & Animal Genome (PAG) conference in San Diego have traditionally followed a format of coordinator-invited presentations. Based on feedback from PAG meeting attendees in 2003 concerning the meeting’s bioinformatics workshops and inspired by the paper-driven format of other international bioinformatics meetings, a different workshop format for bioinformatics was proposed for 2004: an invited keynote speaker presenting a review of specified methodology in the field, followed by presentation of selected papers from a first ever PAG bioinformatics paper competition. The theme of the competitive papers was requested to be ‘bioinformatics applied to answer specific plant and/or animal genome research questions’. As an added incentive for prospective authors, the workshop organizer negotiated with Bioinformatics, to publish the keynote review paper and the five selected papers chosen by a formal process of peer review. I am now pleased to introduce these keynote and five selected papers of the competition, published in this special section of Bioinformatics: