The LNCS journal Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is devoted to inter- and multidisciplinary research in the fields of computer science and life sciences and supports a paradigmatic shift in the techniques from computer and information science to cope with the new challenges arising from the systems oriented point of view of biological phenomena.

This second volume of the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is devoted to considerably extended versions of selected papers presented at the International Workshop on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (IWBRA 2005), part of the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2005), which took place at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in May 2005.

The ten papers selected for the special issue cover a wide range of bioinformatics research such as problems in RNA structure prediction, coding schemes and structural alphabets for protein structure prediction, novel techniques for efficient gene transfer in phylogenetic networks, practical algorithms minimizing recombinations in pedigree phasing, parallel implementation in Open MP for finding the corresponding shortest edit distance between two signed gene permutations, and bioinformatics problems in DNA microarrays.