title: The 20th anniversary of EMBnet: 20 years of bioinformatics for the Life Sciences community.
abstract: The EMBnet Conference 2008, focusing on 'Leading Applications and Technologies in Bioinformatics', was organized by the European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Since its foundation in 1988, EMBnet has been working to promote collaborative development of bioinformatics services and tools to serve the European community of molecular biology laboratories. This conference was the first meeting organized by the network that was open to the international scientific community outside EMBnet. The conference covered a broad range of research topics in bioinformatics with a main focus on new achievements and trends in emerging technologies supporting genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics analyses such as high-throughput sequencing and data managing, text and data-mining, ontologies and Grid technologies. Papers selected for publication, in this supplement to BMC Bioinformatics, cover a broad range of the topics treated, providing also an overview of the main bioinformatics research fields that the EMBnet community is involved in.
authors.forename: Domenica
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: D'Elia
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gisel
authors.forename: Nils-Einar
authors.initials: NE
authors.lastname: Eriksson
authors.forename: Sophia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kossida
authors.forename: Kimmo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mattila
authors.forename: Lubos
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Klucar
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bongcam-Rudloff
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends*; D003226:Congresses as Topic / Q000266:history; D023281:Genomics; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D008967:Molecular Biology; D040901:Proteomics