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 first volume of the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is made up of papers by members of the journal's Editorial Board to provide a representative and smart start-up to the new journal.

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 issue contains four highly detailed papers. The first paper focuses on quantitative aspects of the bgl operon for E.coli. The second contribution deals with ecosystem transitions affecting phenotype expressions and selection mechanisms. The third paper presents the Stochastic Calculus of Looping Sequences (SCLS) suitable for the description of microbiological systems, such as cellular pathways, and their evolution. The final contribution describes the use of biological transactions to make atomic sequences of interactions in the BlenX language.

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices. Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c- straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation,bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS conference aims to bring together researchers and scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb- inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent communities.

The 5th Transactions on Computational Systems Biology volume, edited by Gordon Plotkin, features carefully selected and enhanced contributions initially presented at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing. The 9 papers selected for this special issue discuss various aspects of computational methods, algorithm and techniques in bioinformatics such as gene expression analysis, biomedical literature mining and natural language processing, protein structure prediction, biological database management and biomedical information retrieval.

This volume, the 7th in the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology series, contains a fully refereed and carefully selected set of papers from two workshops: BioConcur 2004 held in London, UK in August 2004 and BioConcur 2005 held in San Francisco, CA, USA in August 2005. The 8 papers chosen for this special issue are devoted to various aspects of computational methods, algorithms, and techniques in bioinformatics.

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, the 14th Transactions on Computational Systems Biology volume, guest edited by Ion Petre and Erik de Vink, focuses on Computational Models for Cell Processes and features a number of carefully selected and enhanced contributions, initially presented at the CompMod workshop, which took place in Aachen, Germany, in September 2011. The papers, written from different points of view and following various approaches, cover a wide range of topics within the field of modeling and analysis of biological systems. In addition, two regular submissions deal with models of self-assembling systems and metabolic constraints on the evolution of genetic codes.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is devoted to inter- and multidisciplinary research in the fields of computer science and life sciences. It 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. The six papers selected for this special issue cover a broad range of topics.