• Munteanu, Cristian Robert

The complexity of the systems and phenomena in Biosciences leads to the necessity of convergence of many scientific fields such as Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence. These fields make up the Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) convergent technologies with important applications in Biomedicine such as accurate and early personalized treatments or improvement of the body tissues. This hot topic issue contains the contribution of a couple of members of three international scientific networks such as Ibero American Network of Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Convergent Technologies funded by CYTED (Ibero-NBIC, http://www.ibero-nbic.udc.es/), ACTION-Grid as the first European initiative on Grid Computing, Biomedical Informatics and Nanoinformatics (http://www.action-grid.eu/) and Cooperative Research Thematic Network on Computational Medicine (COMBIOMED, http://combiomed.isciii.es). In addition, different members participated to the Advisory Board of the ACTION-Grid White Paper on Nanoinformatics, revised and approved by the European Commission. The applications of this convergence are demonstrated in some important review articles contained in this issue. The issue contains ten articles. In the very first article, Lopez-Campos et al. show the applications of the microarrays in colon cancer and the biomedical informatics aspects related to this technology and its applications. In the next article, Dave et al. explain the convergence between Nanotechnology and Bioinformatics into Nanobioinformatics, a research field that encompasses the use of all kinds of biomedical information, from genetic and proteomic data to image data associated with a particular disease condition of a patient. In article 3, Sainz de Murieta et al. describe the biological computing devices implemented by the disciplines of biomolecular computation and synthetic biology. In continuation to this, Brea-Fernandez et al. detail the ability assessment of several in silico bioinformatics tools to accurately predict both pathogenic and neutral missense variants. In the next review, Alvarellos et al. propose the use of MEAs containing nerve cells that shows the importance of fusing bioinformatics, micro/nano-technologies, and AI techniques for the study of these neural complex systems. In article 6, Garcia et al. present an interesting update for the QSAR and docking studies in the case of inhibitors for the glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3β) as candidates of anti-Alzheimer and anti-parasitic compounds. Further, Novoa et al. explain the extraction of quantitative anatomical information from coronary angiographies over the past thirty years by using the Biomedical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. In the next article, Gonzalez-Diaz et al. present a state-of-art review about generalized string pseudo-folding lattices in Bioinformatics and a new QSAR model for enzyme sub-classes, and study of ESTs on Trichinella spiralis by using the Complex Network theory. In article 9, Xiao and Chou describe in detail the analysis of proteins sequences by the pseudo amino acid (PseAA) composition or PseAAC formulated via cellular automata and the last article of Ivanciuc is dealing with quantitative structure – activity relationships (QSAR) based on data obtained with the MolNet Molecular Graph Machine for the GSK – 3β inhibition by aloisines. Thus issue could be found very interesting by both theoretical and experimental specialists in the NBIC convergent fields namely Bioinformatics (Bio-Info), Nanotechnology (Nano) and Artificial Intelligence techniques (Cogno).