Bioinformatics aims to bring the biologists, statisticians and computer scientists together from the point of view of system biology approach to understand the biological phenomenon through innovative applications of statistics and computer science. It entails the creation of advanced databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. The field of Bioinformatics focuses on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) on biological data, which gives the opportunity to quickly and efficiently study heap of genomic information, chemical structure, and functional, structural and evolutionary relatedness of molecular, cell, species and organism. Bioinformatics has already started showing its profound impact on agricultural research and development globally.
Therefore, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) New Delhi has established Center for Agricultural Bioinformatics (CABin) with a team of multi-disciplinary research professionals as a division at Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi. The mission of this Center is to provide computational support to biotechnological research in agriculture. Under the aegis of this Center, a National Agricultural Bioinformatics Grid (NABG) has been established in the country. In this grid, the first super computing hub for Indian Agriculture i.e. Advanced Super computing Hub for OMICS Knowledge in Agriculture – ASHOKA has been set up. This facility is built in a state-of-art Data Center and out of nine super-computers of this grid, two super-computers are ranked at 11th and 24th in the list of top super-computers of India by Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore. This facility was dedicated to the Nation by Honorable Union Minster of Agriculture and Food Processing Industries on January 15, 2014.
In order to provide access to this advanced computing facility to researchers, a National Bio-Computing Portal has been launched through which authenticated users will be able to perform their biological data analysis. This portal consists of number of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics software/workflow/pipelines which will be able to automate routine biological analytics in seamless manner. Also, a Genome Submission Portal is being developed to assist our researchers for submission of their genomic data sets obtained through experimentation.
Mandate
- To undertake research, teaching and training in the field of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
Thrust Area
- To undertake research in priority areas of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
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To design, development and implement biological databases and data warehouse.
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To develop human resources in computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
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To provide analytical and computational support to research in the field of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
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To create and promote inter-disciplinary research groups with focus on computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
