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, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) New Delhi has established Centre
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 Centre is to provide computational support to biotechnological research in agriculture.
Under the aegis of this Centre, a National Agricultural Bioinformatics Grid (NABG) has been
established in the country. In this grid, the first supercomputing hub for Indian Agriculture
i.e. Advanced Supercomputing Hub for OMICS Knowledge in Agriculture – ASHOKA has been set up.
This facility is built in a state-of-art Data Centre 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 Honourable Union Minister 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 a number
of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics software/workflow/pipelines,
which will be able to automate routine biological analytics in a seamless manner. Also,
a Genome Submission Portal is being developed to assist our researchers for the submission
of their genomic data sets obtained through experimentations.
- To undertake research, teaching and training in the field of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
- To undertake research in priority areas of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
- To design, development and implement biological databases and data warehouse.
- To develop human resources in computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
- To provide analytical and computational support to research in the field of computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.
- To create and promote inter-disciplinary research groups with a focus on computational biology and agricultural bioinformatics.