Clinical bioinformatics: a new emerging science

Welcome to the open-access journal titled Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics (JCBi), a truly international journal devoted to clinical applications of bioinformatics, medical informatics and the development of bioinformatics tools, methodologies and approaches for clinical research.JCBi aims to discover how biological and medical informatics can be applied to the development of personalized healthcare, medication and therapies.The field of clinical bioinformatics includes the analysis of human microarray and other omics data, combination of bioinformatics and medical informatics, development of bioinformatics methodologies for clinical research, and human databases.JCBi also aims to establish a scientific channel to translate bioinformatics to clinical and medical application in order to better understand molecular and cellular mechanisms and therapies for human diseases.Clinical bioinformatics is a new emerging science combining clinical informatics, bioinformatics, medical informatics, information technology, mathematics, and omics science together.At the beginning of the 20 th century, clinical physicians needed to be informed and open to advances in omics technology despite the barriers which existed for physicians applying genetic tests, for example the low tolerance for uncertainty, negative attitudes about their responsibility for genetic counseling and testing, and unfamiliarity with ethical issues raised by testing [1].Since the middle of the 20 th century, bioinformatics was suggested to be applied for clinical toxicology [2] and cancer [3].One of the early studies on expressed sequence tags in human stem cells by bioinformatics was performed in 1998 [4], where near 10000 sequences were analyzed.Of these, 48% showed the identity to known genes in the GenBank database, 26.4% matched to the previously deposited in a public domain database, 14% were previously undescribed sequences, and the remaining 12% were mitochondrial DNA, ribosomal RNA, or repetitive sequences.At the