This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the German Conference on Bioinformatics, GCB'96, held in Leipzig, Germany, in September/October 1996. The volume presents 18 revised full papers together with three invited papers; these contributions were selected after a second round of reviewing from the 91 conference presentations. The book addresses current issues in computational biology and biologically inspired computing. The papers are organized in sections on biological and metabolic pathways, sequence analysis, molecular modeling, visualization, and formal languages, and DNA.