Amos, M.,Rasmussen, S.,McCaskill, J.,Dittrich, P.
Introductory Paragraph. We are pleased to present this special issue of Artificial Life, which is dedicated to articles arising from a workshop held on September 6, 2012, as part of the Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) conference in Orleans, France. UCNC is now a well-established meeting in the portfolio of conferences dedicated to nonstandard computation, dating back to 1998. The 2012 conference was hosted by the Fundamental Computer Science Laboratory of the Univversity of Orleans, and the Second Workshop on Biological and Chemical Information Technologies (BioChemIT) was organized by the COBRA project.