This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, RECOMB 2008. It presents current issues in algorithmic, theoretical, and experimental bioinformatics.

Abstract: "Computational Biology is a fairly new subject that arose in response to the computational problems posed by the analysis and the processing of biomolecular sequence and structure data. The field was initiated in the late 60's and early 70's largely by pioneers working in the life sciences. Physicists and mathematicians entered the field in the 70's and 80's, while Computer Science became involved with the new biological problems in the late 1980's. Computational problems have gained further importance in molecular biology through the various genome projects which produce enormous amounts of data. For this bibliography we focus on those areas of computational molecular biology that involve discrete algorithms or discrete optimization. We thus neglect several other areas of computational molecular biology, like most of the literature on the protein folding problem, as well as databases for molecular and genetic data, and genetic mapping algorithms. Due to the availability of review papers and a bibliography from 1984 some older papers will not be explicitly mentioned in this bibliography."

This volume features highlights from the DIMACS Special Year on "Mathematical Support for Molecular Biology". Top researchers presented both new research results and comprehensive overviews on the use of mathematics (especially discrete mathematics) and theoretical computer science in molecular biology. The book provides a unique "snapshot" of this growing area of study. It will be of interest to both experts and novices seeking information on the state of the research.