Zing-IECA 2011 will bring together experimental biologists, computational modelers, and information resource scientists (bioinformaticians) with interests in single-cell biology and the emerging field of RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) in model bacteria. From its inception at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology that was held in Edmonton, Canada in August 2002 {29832}, IECA has held four interdisciplinary workshops and four conferences that brought together experimentalists, modelers, and computational scientists to discuss different studies of model bacteria. The first workshop was held at North Mymms, UK in November 2002 and concerned strategies for interdisciplinary research among computational biologists, experimentalists, and modelers. The 2nd IECA workshop was held the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in March 2003 and focused on bioinformatics. The 3rd IECA workshop was held at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg, Germany in March 2003 and focused on model-driven experimentation. The 1st IECA conference was held at the Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Tsuruoka City, Japan and focused on high-throughput experimentation and modeling. The 2nd IECA conference was held in Banff, Canada in June 2004 and focused on the minimal genome for modeling. The 3rd IECA conference was held at JeJu Island, Korea in November 2006 and focused on metabolic engineering of model bacteria. The 4th IECA conference was held at Hinxton, UK and focused on experimentation, modeling, and informatics related to pathogenesis of closely related bacteria. The 4th IECA workshop was held in West Lafayette, USA in April 2010 and focused on transcriptomics of model bacteria. Accordingly, Zing-IECA 2011 will be the 5th IECA conference.