Welcome to ISCB Latin America 2012 Conference on Bioinformatics

	The second International Society for Computational Biology Latin American regional meeting (ISCB-Latin America) took place in March 17th-21st 2012 in Santiago, Chile. More than 250 people attended, primarily from countries in Latin America. As a scientific conference with an international audience, all oral and poster presentations, as well as all printed materials, were in English.
	
	The major aim of ISCB-Latin America 2012 was to deeply motivate and inspire young Latin American students and post-docs to conduct the best research possible in the areas of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
	
	The first two days of the meeting (March 17-18) were dedicated to hands-on practical tutorials and workshops covering different topics of interest.
	
	The main conference took place March 19th-21st and featured the following six topic sessions:
	
	Session I.   Comparative Genomics and Evolution
	Session II.  Genomics, Proteomics, Metagenomics and Metabolomics
	Session III. Macromolecule Structure/Function Prediction
	Session IV. Computer Aided Drug Design and Docking Simulations
	Session V.  Biomedicine and Immunoinformatics
	Session VI. Functional Genomics and Systems Biology
	
	Each session had two keynote speakers and six oral presentations. There were also two poster sessions.