Editorial

We are delighted to welcome the worldwide systems biology community in Lyon for ICSB2018!

The Lyon University has a long-standing tradition in promoting mathematics and informatics for biology, from the biometrics pioneered by Jean-Marie Legay to the first DNA sequence database created by Richard Grantham and Christian Gautier. The Lyon community in systems biology, now federated by BioSyL (www.biosyl.org), was naturally established on such a fertile ground. It has further developed with the involvement of both the Inria national computer science institute and the Institute for Complex Systems (IXXI).

This was paralleled by strong investment in training, with the creation in 2000 of a Bioinformatics and Modeling course  at the ‘Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon’ and of a license/master curriculum in Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1.

Finally, Lyon has hosted international conferences in systems biology since the early 2000s, starting with the IPG series (Integrative Post-Genomics, 2004-2010) and the LyonSysBio conference since 2014.

For all these scientific reasons, and not to mention the fantastic extra-scientific life quality in Lyon, our city has been chosen to host the 19th International Conference on Systems Biology in 2018.

We have appointed an extraordinary Scientific Program Committee that enthusiastically agreed to help us shape the overall program of that edition. We tried to cover both established and more emerging fields of research that are of interest to the systems biology community at large.

We hope everyone will feel welcome and will return home with vivid memories of the 19th edition of the ICSB.

On behalf of the local organizing committee, Jan Traas and Olivier Gandrillon, co-chairs for ICSB2018 in Lyon