In this issue you will find four computer science related papers from the 1995 Biomath Conference on Mathematical Modelling and Information Systems. Professor Ullrich from the University of Basel has selected and edited the papers: the thanks of J.UCS go to him!

Please find a preface by Professor Ullrich, this volume's guest editor, below.

For the March issue we are preparing a small surprise, so don't forget to read J.UCS again beginning of April!

All the best,

Hermann Maurer
email: hmaurer@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at

Preface:
This special issue contains a selection of refereed papers contributed to the International Symposium and Young Scientists School on Mathematical Modelling and Information Systems in Biology, Ecology and Medicine (BIOMATH-95). The meeting was organized by the Institute of Informatics at the University of Basel and the Research Group for Mathematical Modelling in Biology of the Institute of Biophysics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and held in the ET Vitosha Hotel, Sofia, Bulgaria from August 23 to 27, 1995.

The Conference Programm Committee consisted of Peter Antonelli (Canada), Pierre Auger (France), Yves Cherruault (France), Jean Luc Gouzé (France), Jia Li (USA), Vladislav Krivan (Czech Republic), Philip Maini (UK), Jaroslav Milota (Czech Republic), Willard Miranker (USA), John Norton (UK), Zahari Zlatev (Denmark), and was chaired by the Bulgarian scientists Blagovest Sendov, Roumen Tsanev and Petar Kenderov.

BIOMATH-95 was the first international biomathematical conference to be held in Bulgaria preceded by eight national meetings organized by the Research Group for Mathematical Modelling in Biology of the Institute of Biophysics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The meeting was attended by 50 scientists from 16 different countries; 35 scientific lectures were presented and 25 manuscripts were submitted for publication.

The selected papers in this issue are from those presented at the bioinformatics and computer science sessions. The papers are devoted to hardware and software tools for the solution of particular problems from the field of Biology and Medicine. The refereeing of the papers was handled mostly by members of the Program Committee and participants of the meeting. We are grateful to the referees for their help in the refereeing process and for their quick response which speeded up the publication of the issue. We are grateful to the editors of J.UCS -- Journal of Universal Computer Science for offering us the possibility of publishing this selection and to their contribution to the final selection of the papers.

February 1996 The Organizers and Editors:
Svetoslav M. Markov and Christian P. Ullrich