The 2nd International Symposium on Optimization and Systems Biology (OSB 2008), organized by Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai University and University of Tokyo will be held in Lijiang, China from October 31 to November 3, 2008. The symposium is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Systems Biology and Bioinformatics have become intensive research topics in the recent past decade and attracted great many leading scientists working in Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science. Optimization, Statistics, and many other mathematical methods have been widely used in the field. Following the successful OSB 2007, the purposes of OSB 2008 is to extend the international forum for scientists, researchers, educators, and practitioners to exchange ideas and approaches, to present research findings and state-of-the-art solutions in this interdisciplinary field, including optimization methods and its applications in biosciences and researches on various aspects of Systems Biology, such as integration of genome-wide microarray, proteomic, and metabolomic data, inference and comparison of biological networks, and model testing through design of experiments.