This volume contains the papers which were selected for presentation at the second Bio- formatics Research and Development (BIRD) conference held in Vienna, Austria during July 7–9, 2008. BIRD covers a wide range of topics related to bioinformatics. This year sequence analysis and alignment, pathways, networks, systems biology, protein and RNA structure and function, gene expression/regulation and microarrays, databases and data integration, machine learning and data analysis were the subjects of main interest. The decisions of the Program Committee are based on the recommendations of at least three, up to five, reviews for each paper. As a result, 30 of the 61 submitted c- tributions could be accepted for the conference. We were happy to have three invited talks presented by experienced researchers providing visitors with a good overview but also some very important insights into the fascinating domain of bioinformatics. Abstracts and more information on these talks are provided in the conference program as well as at the conference site. In the second part of this volume the selected contributions of the two workshops which were held in parallel to the main conference are presented: Workshop on - namical Aspects of Perturbation, Intervention and Transition in Biological Systems – PETRIN 2008 and Workshop on Algorithms in Molecular Biology – ALBIO 2008 Poster presentations of the BIRD conference are in the companion proceedings published by the Trauner Verlag, Linz.