BITS2019: the sixteenth annual meeting of the Italian society of bioinformatics

The 16th Annual Meeting of the Bioinformatics Italian Society was held in Palermo, Italy, on June 26-28, 2019. More than 80 scientific contributions were presented, including 4 keynote lectures, 31 oral communications and 49 posters. Also, three workshops were organised before and during the meeting. Full papers from some of the works presented in Palermo were submitted for this Supplement of BMC Bioinformatics. Here, we provide an overview of meeting aims and scope. We also shortly introduce selected papers that have been accepted for publication in this Supplement, for a complete presentation of the outcomes of the meeting.