Book excerpt: This volume contains papers presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW 2008) held at the Marriott Surfers Paradise Resort, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia from December 1 to 3, 2008. The GIW Series provides an international forum for the presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology. Its scope includes biological sequence analysis, protein structure prediction, genetic regulatory networks, bioinformatic algorithms, comparative genomics, and biomolecular data integration and analysis. Boasting a history of 19 years, GIW is the longest-running international bioinformatics conference.