The field of computational biology encompasses a set of investigative tools as much as being a research endeavor in its own right. It is often difficult to gauge the utility and significance of a computational tool, at least until the research community has had sufficient time to explore, exploit and hone it in various applications. In an effort to identify recent notable breakthroughs in the field of computational biology, Nature Biotechnology surveyed leading researchers in the area, asking them to nominate papers of particular interest published in the previous year that have influenced the direction of their research. Some of the nominated papers had been featured in our pages and elsewhere; others were completely off our radar. Although we surveyed a small group of 15 scientists, the nominated papers (Box 1) provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting areas of current computational biology research.

All the papers featured in the following pages were nominated by at least two scientists. Our analysis not only highlights the richness of approaches and growth of the field, but also suggests that researchers of a particular type are driving much of cutting-edge computational biology (Box 2). Read on to find out what characterizes them and what they've been doing in the past year.

Next-generation sequence analysis

Discovery from data repositories

Learning to see

CompBio 2.0