Cloud computing has emerged rapidly as an exciting new paradigm that offers a challenging model of computing and services. Leveraging cloud computing technology, bioinformatics tools can be made available as services to anyone anywhere and through any device. The use of large biodatasets, its highly demanding algorithms, and the hardware for sudden computational resources makes large-scale biodata analysis an attractive test-case for cloud computing.

This special issue aims to foster the dissemination of high quality research in any new idea, method, theory, and technique related to cloud computing and bioinformatics and to showcase the most recent developments and research in cloud computing for biological, genomics, and drug design, considering genomics and drug design on the cloud, biological tools on the cloud, biodatabase on the cloud, cloud-based biocomputing, and all kinds of successful applications. Original and research articles are solicited in all aspects of including theoretical studies, practical applications, new analysis and modeling technology, programming methodologies, and experimental prototypes. The papers will be peer-reviewed and selected on the basis of both their quality and their relevance to the theme of this special issue. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cloud computing for biological databases
• Cloud computing for biological service
• Cloud computing for biological applications
• Cloud computing for drug design (i.e., modeling, virtual screening, docking)
• Cloud computing for genome analysis
• Cloud computing for computational biology techniques (i.e., sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction)
• Cloud computing for sequencing techniques and applications (i.e., resequencing, genome assembly, metagenomic)
• Cloud computing for RNA/protein structure
• Cloud computing for function prediction and classification
• Cloud computing for systems biology (i.e., domain-domain interaction, protein-protein interaction, pathways, network comparison, network alignment)
• Cloud computing for biological applications (i.e., viral research, infection disease)
• Cloud computing for biochip analysis (i.e., microarray, chip analysis)
• GPU technologies related to Biocloud

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/biomed/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/bmri/bioinformatics/bc/ according to the following timetable: