Indian Bioinformatics: Growth Opportunities and Challenges

The spread of bioinformatics centres across India is primarily due to the extensive infrastructure and network that was initiated way back in 1980s by S. Ramachandran, the first Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, and is being supported at 168 locations across the country. Anticipating the dawn of bioinformatics globally as an integration of informatics and biology, the seeds were sown by the linkage set up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) led by N. Seshagiri (Director General of NIC), in a remarkable collaboration with DBT. As with biotechnology, strong teaching initiatives by DBT at the postgraduate level across the country helped in the growth. The recent bioinformatics certification examinations and the consequent fellowships are part of a seminal exercise that tries to provide standards in an area which saw unregulated mushrooming growth in the last decade. Unlike in the USA and Europe, where bioinformat-ics was nucleated by sequence analysis, in India the strong crystallography and biophysics structural background from the tradition of G. N. Rama-chandran resulted in the initial tilt of bioinformatics in India towards structural perspectives. The Biotechnology Information System Network (BTISNET) captured through development of databases, by the centres distributed across the country, recording the diversity of biological resources in the country. The advent of mega sequencing and the large-scale import of genomics and proteomics technologies resulted in the growth of many bioinformatics groups and companies , several of which have connections to the centres of the BTISNET. Following the bioinformatics policy document, the recent years have seen the nurturing of the North Eastern Bioinformatics Network and also international collaborative ventures with countries in Asia and Europe. The trend of an admixture of experimental and computational biology approaches that are needed for systems and synthetic biology is becoming common and signals the next phase of expansion and integration of the bioinformatics network.

BioMed Research International

Bioinformatics education has been a hot topic in South Asia, and the interest in this education peaks with the start of the 21st century. The governments of South Asian countries had a systematic effort for bioinformatics. They developed the infrastructures to provide maximum facility to the scientific community to gain maximum output in this field. This article renders bioinformatics, measures, and its importance of implementation in South Asia with proper ways of improving bioinformatics education flaws. It also addresses the problems faced in South Asia and proposes some recommendations regarding bioinformatics education. The information regarding bioinformatics education and institutes was collected from different existing research papers, databases, and surveys. The information was then confirmed by visiting each institution’s website, while problems and solutions displayed in the article are mostly in line with South Asian bioinformatics conferences and institutions’ objective...

The huge amount of data created by proteomics and genomics studies worldwide has caused bioinformatics to gain prominence and importance for urgency to process and analyze those data. However, its multidisciplinary nature has created a challenge to meet the unique demand for specialist trained in both biology and computing. Several countries, in response to this challenge, have developed a number of manpower training programs. This review presents a description of the meaning, scope, history and development of bioinformatics with focus on prospects and challenges facing bioinformatics education worldwide. The paper also provides an overview of attempts at the introduction of bioinformatics; describes the existing bioinformatics scenario and suggests strategies for effective bioinformatics education for the sustainable growth and development in Nepal.

Bioinformatics has emerged as a rapidly growing field with various applications in life sciences. It involves the development and use of computational tools to analyze and interpret biological data. In Sri Lanka, bioinformatics research has gained momentum in recent years, with the establishment of several research centers and collaborations with international institutions. This review aims to highlight the current trends of bioinformatics in Sri Lanka, including research areas, challenges, and opportunities. Research in Sri Lanka has focused on various areas such as genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery. The country has made significant contributions to the study of genetic disorders, including thalassemia and retinitis pigmentosa. Furthermore, the application of bioinformatics in agriculture and environmental sciences has also been studied. Despite these advancements, there are several challenges to the development of bioinformatics in Sri Lanka, including limited funding and access to computational resources. To address these challenges, Sri Lankan bioinformatics researchers have established collaborations with international institutions and have actively participated in international conferences and workshops. The country has also made significant progress in developing the necessary infrastructure and expertise to support bioinformatics research. In conclusion, the current trends of bioinformatics in Sri Lanka reflect the country's potential to become a major contributor to the global bioinformatics community. With the availability of talented researchers, increasing research collaborations, and growing support from the government and industry, Sri Lanka is poised to make significant contributions to the field of bioinformatics.

2018

Collections of life sciences information from scientific investigations, highthroughput experiment technology, available literature, and computational analysis are called biological databases. It contains information from research areas comprising genomics, microarray gene expression, proteomics, phylogenetics, metabolomics, gene function, structure, localization and similarities of biological sequences. In a nutshell, databases are libraries for storage and representation of biological data obtained from the scientific community which converts data into knowledge. Utmost biological databases are available from websites that categorize data which operators can browse through the data online. Due to the vast amount of data generated by high-throughput DNA sequencers in the investigation of genome, transcriptome, and exome sequences of various organisms in current times, the biological data has stored with an exponential rate. The availability of enormous amount of biological data (se...

2019

The aim of the present study is to analyze the productivity growth of Bioinformatics research publications in India during the period (2009-2018). The primary data was collected from the Scopus database. The study examine scientific productivity on various scientometrics parameters i.e. year wise growth rate of publications, most productive authors name and their no. of publications, subject wise distribution of publications, source title, significant keywords, affiliations, funding agencies, after the analysis it has been found that the highest number of 348 research papers were published in the year 2018 and Chakraborty, C. was most productive author with 20 contribution and got the first rank. In the field of Biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, the highest 1269 research papers were published and the highest 98 articles were published in PloS one journal while the most significant keyword was ‘Bioinformatics’ which was used in 1604 research papers. The most productive or...

BioTechniques, 2003

Bioinformatics is a practical discipline that is concerned with the methods used by biologists to store and analyze their research data using computers. As such, it has received quite a bit of attention in the pages of BioTechniques. This has been very useful to biologists, since there have been few journals that publish articles that focus on the description of useful bioinformatics innovations. Often, major advances in bioinformatics are buried in the Materials and Methods sections of papers whose titles and primary focuses are on a basic biological problem. This makes it difficult for people to learn about these innovations if they are working on similar data analysis problems in unrelated branches of biology.

2018

Malaria kills about 3 million people each year and most of these deaths happen to children below the age of 5. The use of anti-malarial drugs is essential in malaria control but the efficacy of these drugs are been compromised due to resistance by the parasite. This problem stated above has called for further study into the disease-causing parasite through computer technology. In this review, I seek to provide an overview of the state of Malaria bioinformatics in Africa. I will highlight the progress so far, the limitations and suggest possible ways forward. This review will not add new knowledge to the field of bioinformatics but rather put together literature to provide information to new researchers who want to research into Malaria bioinformatics in Africa.

Plos Computational Biology, 2009

Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2018

It is easy for today's students and researchers to believe that modern bioinformatics emerged recently to assist nextgeneration sequencing data analysis. However, the very beginnings of bioinformatics occurred more than 50 years ago, when desktop computers were still a hypothesis and DNA could not yet be sequenced. The foundations of bioinformatics were laid in the early 1960s with the application of computational methods to protein sequence analysis (notably, de novo sequence assembly, biological sequence databases and substitution models). Later on, DNA analysis also emerged due to parallel advances in (i) molecular biology methods, which allowed easier manipulation of DNA, as well as its sequencing, and (ii) computer science, which saw the rise of increasingly miniaturized and more powerful computers, as well as novel software better suited to handle bioinformatics tasks. In the 1990s through the 2000s, major improvements in sequencing technology, along with reduced costs, gave rise to an exponential increase of data. The arrival of 'Big Data' has laid out new challenges in terms of data mining and management, calling for more expertise from computer science into the field. Coupled with an ever-increasing amount of bioinformatics tools, biological Big Data had (and continues to have) profound implications on the predictive power and reproducibility of bioinformatics results. To overcome this issue, universities are now fully integrating this discipline into the curriculum of biology students. Recent subdisciplines such as synthetic biology, systems biology and whole-cell modeling have emerged from the ever-increasing complementarity between computer science and biology.