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Top rank for DBT on IT implementation
The Department of biotechnology has captured top 4th rank in IT implementation towards e-readiness. This has been announced recently by the Ministry of Information Technology (MIT) through their survey carried out through an independent agency. The central node of BITS is responsible for all IT related activities in the DBT.
New initiatives for the 10th plan
Bioinformatics cannot be ignored by any country intending to remain up-to-date in the biomedical, biotechnological and agricultural sector. In addition countries like India must manage their own scientific data of indigenous biological species, local epidemiological data and biodiversity. These tasks require statistics and informatics experts to interact with biologists and use bioinformatics software. This will lead to development of capability to solve problems locally. To facilitate this process bioinformatics/biocomputing shall be introduced in all DBT supported educational activities. Establishment of small software groups and companies will be also encouraged. At present, advanced bioinformatics is concentrated at a few research centers and private companies around the world that have the capacity to employ personnel with highly specialized training.
Establishment of Centres of Excellence (COE) in Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is growing as an independent discipline and helping immensely to accelerate the growth of Biotechnology. Simultaneously there is enormous growth in the biological data. The size of the data banks particularly related to molecular biology is doubling every nine months. Ever year new web based at least 100 biological data bases are created either of primary data or secondary data. There is thus need to create leaders in bioinformatics which will provide a new direction in this fast changing area. In earlier years BTIS has created several centres in different parts of the country, at different research laboratories and Universities and observed that a few centres among these have potential to take up the leadership role in Bioinformatics. It has been therefore decided to establish five advanced research & training centres in the country by enhancing the existing infrastructure, by providing additional man power and giving the flexibility in their governance. These centres are termed as Centres of Excellence (COE) in bioinformatics. The missions of the COE will be to undertake advance research in bioinformatics, provide Ph.D. and post doctoral training, develop new solutions so that the Bioinformatics industry in India will get support to solve complex biological problems and get the required high end man power. These COE will help in creating IP in bioinformatics in a major fashion. Thus COE’s will have state of the art computational facilities, access to the fast network and establish a network of experts with different background such as modern biology systematics, computer science, information technology, biomaterials statistics etc. These centres will utilize the advancements in biotechnology, biological sciences to help India to become the leader in Bioinformatics.
Upgrdation of selective Sub-DICS into DICS
It has been recognized that few bioinformatics centres with little support from DBT have done extremely well in last few years due to their own interest in this area, support from the parent organization, existing leadership and pressure from the peer group etc. DBT will support these identified centres by enhancing their infrastructural facilities and also by providing additional man power. The infrastructure supported to these small centres will be brought at par with major centres – distributed information centres of BTIS. These upgraded centres are expected to expand their R & D activities, human resource development activities and creation of intellectual property.
Setting up to Teraflop/ Petaflop Super Computer Facilities for Bioinformatics
As the concept of virtual laboratory system is vigorously being followed in the field of Biotechnology, there is a need to establish a powerful computing systems to carry out genome sequence to function analysis, protein structure prediction, pathway modeling, molecular modeling and simulation studies. Unless the existing computational tools evolve and new revolutionary systems emerge the promise that the new biology holds will largely remain unfulfilled. The need for high performance computing facility needs not be emphasized. It has been decided to establish such supercomputing facility at one or two centers in collaboration with computer industry that will attract Indian scientists to take up highly challenging computational intensive problem to bridge the gap between developed nations and India.
Human Resource Development
Considering the requirement of postgraduate level manpower to conduct R&D in bioinformatics, there is a need to introduce postgraduate courses like M.Sc./ M.Tech./ Ph.D. in bioinformatics universities conducting the post diploma courses in bioinformatics would be encouraged to take initiative to start these courses so that the infrastructure can be used to its full capacity and quality training will be provided.
Databases / Software Development
Several subject specific databases/software for the application of biotechnology research would be developed and made available on BIOGRID for access to scientific community. Integration of databases developed by BTIS centers will be carried out. System will be developed to upgrade the quality of database.
Training Activities on Bioinformatics
Short term and long term training courses in bioinformatics for scientists from different disciplines in biology, statistics, computer science are very important and over the years found highly useful. These activities will be intensified. Experts from other countries will be used as resource persons along with Indian experts. Upgradation of knowledge base and convergence of knowledge of experts from different disciplines to bioinformatics will be achieved. Use and application of bioinformatics in Agri-biotechnology and environment biotechnology due to recent advancements will be focused through these training programmes.
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