Bioinformatics is a multifaceted area, combining biology, genetics, mathematics, computer science, and statistics, and filling the gap between biological data and the different procedures used for data storing, distribution, and analysis. At present, due to the large size of some datasets, researchers now face difficulties in choosing the best method to apply to specific data sets for the most effective computation.

Meanwhile, the use of cloud technology is growing day by day, representing a trend that, if adopted by bioinformatics researchers, could provide significant benefit. Research should focus on more effective user interfaces, data analysis, and methods of data collection. Cloud platforms can provide global effective access to different computational resources and data. Cloud based computing offers the computational power and storage to manage this overwhelming availability of data, while cloud computing reduces the complexity of computing infrastructures, reduces the cost of data analysis, and most importantly is changing the overall model of biomedical research and health provision.

The Special Issue aims to collect high quality papers focussing on methods, technologies, and algorithms for the design and development of cloud-based bioinformatics applications, techniques, and tools. Authors are invited to submit both original papers and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Cloud applications for bioinformatics and computational biology
• Bioinformatics databases
• Machine learning and its applications in bioinformatics
• High-throughput comprehensive bioinformatics pipelines
• Public, private and hybrid clouds
• Machine learning based cloud and data mining
• Large scale biological and biomedical databases
• Analysis of proteomics and genome data
• Feature selection and extraction in bioinformatics
• Data and text mining approaches in bioinformatics
• Security and privacy issues in bioinformatics