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.A total of 18 contributed papers were selected for presentation at GIW 2008 and for inclusion in this book. The selected papers come from institutions in 18 countries. In addition, this book contains abstracts from the six invited speakers: Sean Grimmond (Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Australia), Eugene V Koonin (National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, USA), Ming Li (University of Waterloo, Canada), Yi-Xue Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Jiaotong University, China), John Mattick (Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Australia), and Eric Schadt (Rosetta Inpharmatics, USA).