The Bioinformatics Italian Society (BITS) is a non-profit scientific association grounded on 19 June 2003, to gather scientists with interests in the field of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The major aim of the association is to promote Bioinformatics as a scientific discipline and to spread it in both the scientific and the technological environment. The annual meeting of the BITS is an increasingly important event providing an overview of Italian bioinformatics research and an international forum for in-depth assessment of new challenges and bioinformatics solutions in the fast moving field of the Life Sciences research. Main topics covered by the BITS 2010 conference include many areas of interest such as structural and functional genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, systems biology, and proteomics with a particular focus on tools and strategies for the storage, management and analysis of data produced by next generation sequencing platforms and other highthroughput technologies.