The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC) is a leading conference in the Bioinformatics community and has grown rapidly since its inception in 2003. The goal of the annual conference series is to enable high quality interaction on bioinformatics research.

The Tenth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC 2012) was held in Melbourne, Australia. The conference spanning the dates of the 17^th to the 19^th of January brought together more than 50 researchers, professionals, industry leaders and students from all over the globe. The participants came from institutions in the following 16 countries and regions (in alphabetical order): Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Netherlands, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, USA and Vietnam. The conference program included 3 keynote speakers (Profs. Jenny Graves, Terry Speed, Peer Bork), 3 invited speakers (Profs. Steven Jones, Narayanaswamy Srinivasan, Robin Gasser), 42 selected talks, 3 tutorial sessions and 30 posters.

The titles of the keynote talks were:

The tutorial topics for APBC 2012 included: Analysis of Gene Expression and Proteomic Profiles based on Biological Networks (Limsoon Wong), Introduction to NGS informatics (Andrew Lonie), and Protein Inference: Concepts, Algorithms, and Software Tools (Zengyou He and Weichuan Yu).

The emphasis of APBC has been algorithmic development and innovation in Bioinformatics and this year that theme continued. Reflecting the ever-changing nature of Bioinformatics and its adaption to advances in technology, a strong emphasis was placed on post sequencing data mining. A wide range of topics in Bioinformatics were covered at the conference and were categorised as:

In 2012, APBC received a substantial number of submissions from a diverse range of countries. Participants in the 2012 APBC came from every continent with the exception of Africa; however actual participants may represent geographies outside of their institutions. The APBC 2012 conference has received 129 submissions covering a wide range of topics in Bioinformatics.

The conference's scope was wide in order to adapt itself quickly to this progressive research field. The broad composition of the expert program committee was well equipped to handle the diversity of topics under the banner of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Of the 129 submitted papers, each paper was sent to three Program Committee members to review (102 papers received three peer reviews) and with an acceptance rate of 32.5%. We wish to thank and acknowledge the Program Committee members and their contributions.

The Program Committee members are:

We would also like to thank all local Organizing Committee members behind the scenes, especially Phoebe Chen, Scott Mann, Howard Lee, Subha Kalyaanamoorthy, for their hard work on the website, local arrangement and many other miscellaneous tasks. We also thank Publication & Web Chair Scott Mann, Ka Ho Chi and Howard Lee.

Declarations

Acknowledgements

This article has been published as part of BMC Genomics Volume 13 Supplement 1, 2012: Selected articles from the Tenth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC 2012). The full contents of the supplement are available online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/13?issue=S1.