ISCB is eager to support the growth of regional and specialist meetings. One such meeting is the first Joint ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics of Infectious Diseases, 30 November -03 December, 2009, in Bamako, Mali. The meeting is organized by the Malaria Research and Training Center, University of Bamako (Mali), the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ASBCB), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).