The 8th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA’12) will be held in Dallas, Texas on May 21-23, 2012. The ISBRA symposium provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. The deadline for submitting extended abstracts (LNBI proceedings) is February 6, 2012; for short abstracts (oral or poster presentation) the deadline is April 9, 2012. For more details visit the symposium website at http://www.cs.gsu.edu/isbra12/.