The LNCS journal Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is devoted to inter- and multidisciplinary research in the fields of computer science and life sciences and supports a paradigmatic shift in the techniques from computer and information science to cope with the new challenges arising from the systems oriented point of view of biological phenomena.

This, the 5th Transactions on Computational Systems Biology volume, edited by Xiaohua Hu, Yi Pan and Tsau Young Lin, features a number of carefully selected and enhanced contributions initially presented at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing held in Beijing, China, in July 2005.

The 9 papers selected for this special issue are devoted to various aspects of computational methods, algorithms and techniques in bioinformatics such as gene expression analysis, biomedical literature mining and natural language processing, protein structure prediction, biological database management and biomedical information retrieval.