The annual international conference "Bioinformatics: From Algorithms to Applications" (BiATA) was hosted in Saint Petersburg, Russia on July 12–15, 2021 and was accompanied by a two-day online workshop dedicated to metagenomic data analysis.
This year BiATA celebrated its 5th anniversary. Since its inception the conference has quickly gained international renown and prestige by bringing together leading scientists from all over the world. Every year the invited speaker list was invariably filled with top minds in the field.
For all five years, the conference has remained one of the few international events aiming to unite algorithm developers and programmers who create tools for a wide range of research in all areas of modern life science and their users. Keeping this objective in mind, BiATA aims to promote multidisciplinary research and education.
In line with our traditions, BiATA2021 contributes to the active spread of bioinformatics across all areas of life science research, identifies new trends and needs in such important areas of bioinformatics science as algorithmic bioinformatics, genomics, transcriptomics, and the search for biologically active molecules which could prove to be important contributors in the fields of agriculture, medicine and other spheres of human life.
Topics covered by the conference traditionally include, but are not limited to:

Sequencing technologies
Assembly of the genome
Genomic sequence analysis
Genomics
Transcriptomics
Metagenomics
Natural Products Discovery
Agrigenomics
Viromics

As part of the conference’s ongoing collaboration with EMBL-EBI, a two-day online seminar was held once again covering the analysis and annotation of metagenomic data using MGnify [1].
The online format of the conference, which was necessary due to the constantly changing epidemiological restrictions caused by COVID-19, did not hinder the speakers’ ability to present interesting oral and poster presentations.
Abstracts published in this BMC Bioinformatics supplement cover software tools, sequence analysis, genome assembly, comparative genomics and more.
The conference was financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (№ 075-15-2020-922, 16.11.2020).