Computational and systems biology are interdisciplinary sciences that have been greatly advancing in the last decades by harnessing the increased power of computation and mathematics. Their aim is to apply large-scale computational and numerical methods to the fields of molecular, cellular and structural biology, in order to answer emerging biological questions that were not possible to tackle with traditional approaches. The foundations of these disciplines lie in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, ecology, evolution, anatomy, neuroscience, visualization, animation, etc. In this context, thousands of researchers around the world work on a wide range of computational, analytical and theoretical methods, to study amongst others gene regulation, structure prediction, protein design, analysis of cell signaling and metabolic networks. They focus on the design, prediction and discovery of emergent properties of cells, tissues and organisms, on studying and modelling complex interactions within biological systems, on developing algorithms and databases, and on the use of advanced computing. To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 350 projects in computational biology, systems biology, bioinformatics and biostatistics, representing more than EUR 700 million invested in these research areas. This brochure has been published on the occasion of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology / 16th European Conference on Computational Biology, taking place from 21 to 25 July 2017 in Prague (Czech Republic).
