The main objective of this conference is to bring people together from diverse disciplines to exchange ideas, promote cross-disciplinary collaborations and to form a synthesis of appropriate systems-level approaches. The meeting is therefore purposely broad to cover all aspects of genomics to systems biology, a unique combination that is highly appreciated by the participants. Over the past decade, this EMBO conference has therefore served as an important venue in helping to shape the field, or to be more precise to help generate a community of scientists that come from very diverse disciplines, each with the common goal to understand the systems level properties of their system of interest.