Special collection of bioinformatics in the era of precision medicine

<正>Precision medicine advocates for the practice of customized disease treatment and prevention such that all clinical decisions are made based on the characteristics of individual patients. The precision medicine framework has been enthusiastically endorsed by the health care community and is set to have a profound impact on the health care practice. However, adopting the precision medicine ideology in the clinics requires solving a series of technical challenges, particularly in informatics and data analytics. To better serve this newly emerging area of research, we present this special issue to showcase the latest research developments in bioinformatics which has been widely regarded as a major stakeholder in the advancement of precision medicine. The ten papers appear in special collection cover a wide range of topics and can be broadly categorized into the following three main areas: statistical method development; informatics method development and algorithms for translational bioinformatics.