External referees

Modern Life Sciences strongly rely on computational methods. In the last decades we wit-nessed an exponential growth of data available and to be handled by scientists. These ever increasing demands power the research in bioinformatics, which is consequently a rapidly growing discipline. Many of the computational problems faced by the bio-sciences can be naturally formalized in constraint-systems over finite domains or reals. The contributions to the WCB series of workshop of the last years, starting from 2005, provide an excel-lent overview over recent approaches for tackling bioinformatics problems using constraint methodology. Constraint techniques proved to be successful for a variety of problems. Some of the discussed topics were sequence analysis, biological systems simulations, protein structure prediction and docking, pedigree analysis, haplotype inference, and many others. This year, we could select 7 strong workshop contributions out of 8 submissions. The discussed topics will comprise the application of constraint-based methods to SNP selec-tion, biosystems simulation, hidden markov models, haplotype inference, and protein struc-ture prediction. The variety of topics and the continuing high interest in the workshop em-phasize once more that constraint-based methods are a very valuable tool for bioinformatics and promise significant advance in a broad application range