Biocloud: Cloud Computing for Biological, Genomics, and Drug Design

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. The research papers selected for this special issue represent recent progresses in the aspects, including theoretical studies, practical applications, new analysis and modeling technology, programming methodologies, and experimental prototypes. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field but also stimulate future research in the biocloud environments.