Combining biology, computer science, mathematics, and statistics, the field of bioinformatics has become a hot new discipline with profound impacts on all aspects of biology and industrial application. However, due to limitations of traditional algorithms, scientists have been increasingly forced to rethink the way they adapt modeling approaches to challenges created by a wealth of biological data. Now, as computational intelligence (CI) has been applied to bioinformatics with promising results, there is a need for a thorough and comprehensive overview of the importance of and recent developments in CI methods across a range of bioinformatics problems.