Preface

The Eighth Workshop on Genome Informatics (GIW '97) was held at Yebisu Garden Place, Tokyo, during December 12-13, 1997. GIW started in 1990 as a domestic workshop and has now become an international forum for researchers, practitioners and users working on various aspects of Genome Informatics. This volume was edited with the papers and the poster/software demonstrations presented at GIW '97.

In response to "GIW '97 Call for Papers", 29 papers were submitted. Each paper was reviewed by the program committee members based on the importance in Genome Science, computational advance, theoretical analyses, and experimental results in addition to their originality, timeliness, and clarity of presentation. The program committee selected 15 full talk papers and 8 short talk papers from 29 papers. GIW '97 invited Jerome Chailloux (GENSET), Antoine Danchin (Pasteur Institute), Piotr P. Slonimski (Centre de Genetique Moleculaire du CNRS), and Michael S. Waterman (University of Southern California) for invited talks.

The abstracts of 10 software demonstrations and 55 posters are also contained in this volume intending to present the current features in Genome Informatics. These posters and software demonstrations were not formally reviewed.

The program committee wishes to thank all of those who submitted papers for consideration, presented posters and software demonstrations, and helped with the reviewing process, as well as those who supported GIW '97. The program committee also wishes to thank colleagues at Human Genome Center, University of Tokyo, for the huge amount of hours they spent for local arrangement, publicity, finance, and publication. All information about GIW '97 will be available from the URL site http: //vww.hgc.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/giw97.

Satoru Miyano
Program Committee Chair