This volume contains the papers which were selected for oral presentation at the first Bioinformatics Research and Development (BIRD) conference held in Berlin, Germany during March 12-14, 2007. BIRD covers a wide range of topics related to bioinformatics like microarray data, genomics, single nucleotide polymorphism, sequence analysis, systems biology, medical applications, proteomics, information systems. The conference was very competitive. From about 140 submissions only 36 were selected by the Program Committee for oral presentation at BIRD and for publication in these proceedings. The acceptance rate was 1/4. The decisions of the Program Committee were guided by the recommendations of several reviewers for each paper. It should be mentioned that these proceedings have companion proceedings published by the Austrian Computer Society where selected poster presentations of the BIRD conference are included. The invited talk titled "From Flies to Human Disease" by Josef Penninger, one of the leading researcher in genetic experiments for investigating disease pathogenesis, was very inspiring and gave new insights into future bioinformatics challenges.