The Institute for Advanced Study in Science and Technology’s Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility provides the necessary resources for several computational and statistical research utilising biological data. The group is well-versed in doing sequence-based analyses of all kinds, including analysis of genome, metagenome, and transcriptome. Furthermore, the facility holds software and workstations capable of running complex molecular dynamic simulations, training machine learning models, performing cheminformatics optimisations etc. The infrastructure provides access to a large range of licenced and freely available software programmes utilised throughout the fields of computational and systems biology.
During the year 2011, the center was initially supported by a grant from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India. In the later part of the year 2021, the centre was continued as an in-house project within the institute. The functions of the centre included acquisition, creation and development of programmes and biological data management along with educating researchers through various training programmes and workshops. The centre has secured 4th position and received the award for “Incentive Awards for publication -2017” by DBT. The collaborative research works of the centre has succeeded in publishing a number of research articles across reputed peer reviewed journals.
The centre developed a pipeline to simplify the NGS data analysis workflow and developed high throughput computing infrastructure facilities along with various proprietary bioinformatics applications, making it available for the region. The centre has achieved promising outcomes in the field of microbial bioinformatics such as microbial de novo genome assembly from 2nd and 3rd generation sequencing data; characterization of antimicrobial metabolite/s and biosynthetic gene clusters etc.
The centre has developed and currently maintaining an online database named Antimicrobial Metabolites Producing and Plant Growth Promoting Microbial Database (AMPPPMD).
Areas of specific Research and Expertise
- Whole Genome Assembly and Annotation from Next Generation Sequencing and long read 3rd Generation Sequencing like PacBio and Oxford Nanopore.
- Characterization of Microbial isolates, Detection of antimicrobial biosynthetic gene clusters, Metabolomic analysis of pathways
- Multiomics analysis (RNA-Seq, proteomic and metabolomic data analysis) from sequencing data
- Metagenomics data analysis and pipeline development using QIIME2 and R programming using packages like Phyloseq and Vegan.
- Cheminformatics, Molecular Dynamics and Structure Analysis and Modelling of protein structures.
- Development of Scalable database of biological, chemical data, sequences, development of web based tools (e.g. BLAST, genome Browser etc.)
- Data Science, statistical analysis, data visualisation and machine learning
Project Coordinator
Dr. Debajit Thakur
Associate Professor II and Coordinator BIF
Life science Division, IASST,
Phone: +91-7002295340;
Email: debajitthakur@iasst.gov.in