Proceedings of the 2013 MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference

tenth annual conference of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS 2013), The 10th Anniversary in a Decade of Change: Discovery in a Sea of Data, took place at the Stoney Creek Inn & Conference Center in Columbia, Missouri on April 5-6, 2013. This year's Conference Chairs were Gordon Springer and Chi-Ren Shyu from the University of Missouri and Edward Perkins from the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center, who is also the current MCBIOS President (2012-3). There were 151 registrants and a total of 111 abstracts (51 oral presentations and 60 poster session abstracts). Keynote speakers were John Quackenbush from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, whose talk was titled The Road to Genomic Medicine is Paved with Data, and Veronica Vieland from Nationwide Children's Hospital and Ohio State University, who spoke on Is the Universe Made of Information? Dr. William Slikker, Director of the Food and Drug Administration's, National Center for Toxicological Research, concluded with a talk on the past ten years of MCBIOS and a perspective on its future. Participants also had the opportunity to attend several workshops: 1) Dr. Peter Cooper, National Center for Biotechnology Information/NIH, NCBI Tools Webinar. 2) Dr. Wieda Tong, National Center for Toxicological Research/FDA, ArrayTrack Workshop. 3) Drs. Joshi Trupti & Dong Xu - University of Missouri, Soybean Knowledge Base (SoyKB): A Powerhouse for Soybean Research and Breeding Workshop The winners of conference awards were: Best Paper Award: Mikhail G. Dozmorov et al. Systematic classification of non-coding RNAs by epigenomic similarity [1] Best Paper Runner-up: Yi Yang et al. Differential Reconstructed Gene Interaction Networks for Deriving Toxicity Threshold in Chemical Risk Assessment [2] Best Oral Presentations (Post-Doctoral fellows): 1st Place: Zheng Wang, University of Missouri 2nd Place: Binsheng Hong, FDA/NCTR Best Oral Presentations (students): 1st Place: Awantika Singh, UALR/UAMS 2nd Place: Anna Bennet, University of Missouri 3rd Place: Yifei Xu, Mississippi State University Best Poster (Computation): 1st Place: Tian Gui, University of Mississippi 2nd Place: Surya Kilaparty, UALR 3rd Place: Tamer Aldwairi, Mississippi State University Best Poster (Biology): 1st Place: Trupti Joshi, University of Missouri 2nd Place: Joseph Reddy, Mississippi State University 3rd Place: Nathan Crabtree, UALR