In this work, we address the biclustering of gene expression data with evolutionary computation, which has been proven to have excellent performance on complex problems. In expression data analysis, the most important goal may not be finding the maximum bicluster, as it might be more interesting to find a set of genes showing similar behavior under a set of conditions. Our approach is based on evolutionary algorithms and searches for biclusters following a sequential covering strategy. In addition, we pay special attention to the fact of looking for high quality biclusters with large variation. The quality of biclusters found by our approach is discussed by means of the analysis of yeast and colon cancer datasets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.