This special issue
continues the series of BioMed Central special post-conference journal issues
(BMC Genetics, BMC Plant biology, BMC Genomics, BMC Evolutionary biology, BMC
Systems Biology). All these issues collate the papers presented at
BGRS\SB-2016, 10th International Conference “Bioinformatics of Genome
Regulation and Structure\Systems Biology” which took place at August 29
September 2, 2016 in Novosibirsk, Russia. The BGRS conference series started in
1998 in Novosibirsk Akademgorodok (http://conf.bionet.nsc.ru/bgrssb2016/
archive/) Since then BGRS/SB was been organized biannually by the Institute of
Cytology and Genetics of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
(ICG SB RAS). Across all these years, the Conference was chaired by Prof.
Nikolay A. Kolchanov (ICG SB RAS, Russia) and Prof. Ralf Hofestädt (Bielefeld
University, Germany). In 2016, the multi-conference held parallel events and
symposia on systems biology and biomedicine (SBioMed-2016)
(http://conf.bionet.nsc.ru/ishg2016/en/), cognitive sciences
(http://physiol.ru/csgb2016/), and mathematical modeling in biology
(MM-HPC-BBB-2016) (http:// conf.bionet.nsc.ru/mm-hpc-bbb-2016/en/). Since 2014,
the BGRS Program Committee has collaborated with BioMed Central on full-text
thematic issues reflecting the main science achievements of the conference
series in past years. Recently BioMed Central had published several special
issues based on best materials presented at the conference in BMC Genetics [1]
(http://bmcgenet.biomedcentral.com/articles/supplements/volume-16-supplement-1),
BMC Genomics (http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/
articles/supplements/volume-15-supplement-12), BMC Evolutionary Biology (http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/
articles/supplements/volume-15-supplement-1), and BMC Systems biology
(http://bmcsystbiol.biomedcentral.com/
articles/supplements/volume-9-supplement-2). Current issue of BMC Genetics
represents latest breakthroughs in genetics discussed at the conference and
includes applications of high-throughput sequencing and computational biology
for genetics studies in humans and in laboratory animal models. At the
Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS – the host of the BGRS\SB-2016
multiconference these types of studies represent one of the most important
research themes. Many of these works are done in frame of national and
international collaborations, and involve young researchers working on their
PhD Thesis projects. The paper by E.V.Ignatieva and colleagues [2] opens this
special issue by endeavor into the functional annotation of genes regulating
feeding behavior, which is a complex problem related to obesity and
pre-disposition to the associated diseases. The authors proposed a
computational approach to annotation by integrating various mined sources,
including previously published original research and review articles, GWAS
meta-analyses, and OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) data. A
compendium comprising more than 500 human genes controlling food behavior is
expected to be useful for pathology risk estimation and for design of new
pharmacology approaches to treat human obesity. The work by Matveeva et al.
considers regulatory single nucleotide polymorphisms (rSNPs) in the tumour
suppressor APC gene. It was shown that both putative promoters of APC (1A and
1B) drive transcription in an in vitro reporter experiment, many SNPs are
functionally relevant and allele G of rs79896135 may be associated with the
predisposition to colorectal cancer [3]. The article by Kudryavtseva et al.
highlights molecular mechanism of hexokinases function in tumorigenesis of
human colorectal cancer and melanoma.