This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Bioinformatics Research and Development Conference, BIRD 2007, held in Berlin, Germany in March 2007. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on microarray and systems biology and networks, medical, SNPs, genomics, systems biology, sequence analysis and coding, proteomics and structure, databases, Web and text analysis.