About
The Centre for Bioinformatics was established by the University of Kerala in January 2005 to take up teaching, research and extension activities in bioinformatics and computational biology. This inter-disciplinary centre focuses of the computational applications in biology, drawing knowledge from mathematics, statistics, computer science, information technology, biology and bio-technology. The centre has currently a post-graduate programme (MSc. in Computational Biology) and a post-masters programme (MPhil. in Bioinformatics) in addition to research programmes leading to PhD. in Bioinformatics/Computational Biology.
The centre has a full-fledged Informatics Lab with, whereas wet labs are shared with the Life science Depts. Facilities ranging from Gel electrophoresis and RTPCR to electron microscope are at the disposal of the students. In addition, the Rajiv Gandhi Centre of Biotechnology (RGCB) in Thiruvananthapuram also supports our programme with expert human resources and short workshops at their Labs which include DNA & Protein sequencing systems, DNA finger printing facility and Molecular Imager. An excellent collection of over 500 books on Bioinformatics and allied areas are available at the Centre, in addition to facilities of the Campus Library and the University Library.
One of the major successes of the centre has been industrial incubation of a bioinformatics company, launched by the alumnus of the centre. The company SooryaKiran Bioinformatics Pvt Ltd. (see http://www.sooryakiran.com), has in a short span of time secured work from American and Japanese clients in the area of sequence analysis and synthetic biology and has registered good growth by the end of second year of its operations.
The MPhil. (Bioinformatics) programme is offered under Credit and Semester System with 15 seats. The courses include: Bio-Mathematics & Statistics, Web Programming, Genomics Proteomics and Computer-Aided Drug Discovery, Introduction to IT (E), Introduction to Life Sciences (E), Algorithms in Computational Biology (E), Micro Array Bioinformatics, Applied Bioinformatics (E), Seminar, Project & Viva Voce.
The Msc. (Computational Biology) programme with 8 seats admits students from computing and allied areas (BSc. Computer Science, BSc. Electronics, BCA, BSc. Physics and Computer Applications, BSc. in any branch with PGDCA, BTech. Biotechnology). It covers the following courses: Introduction to Life Sciences, Bio Mathematics & Statistics, Bio-Physics, Computational Genomics, Introduction to Biotechnology, Computational Proteomics & Metabolemics, Computational Transcriptomics, Molecular Phylogenetics, Advanced Programming Tools, Computer Aided Drug Design, Micro Array Image Processing, Project & Viva Voce, and Elective courses (Systems Biology, Data Mining, Professional Studies, Synthetic Biology, Advanced Topics, Programming in Perl, Soft Computing methods in Bioinformatics)
The Centre has attracted funding from various state and national agencies such as Kerala State IT Mission, Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of India, Dept. of Bio-Technology, Govt. of India, University Grants Commission, Dept. of Science, Technology and Environment, Govt. of Kerala.
Workshops and talks are organized regularly by the centre. Workshops/Seminars on Bioinformatics, Molecular Visualisation Softwares, Microarray Image Processing, Computer Modeling of Biological Pathways, Computer-Aided Drug Design, Scilab for Life Scientists, HMM for Bioinformaticians are some of the themes in the recent past. Bioinformatica India 08 (January 17-18, 2008) is a prestigious event organized by the Centre.
Linkages with other institutions are mainly through student projects. MPhil. Students typically do their project work in institutions such as Bioinformatics Centre, University of Pune, AIIMS, New Delhi, Functional Genomics Unit, IGIB, New Delhi, Centre for Biotechnology, AnnaUniversity, Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Trivandrum, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The Centre is also a research centre for interdisciplinary research in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The areas identified are genomic signal processing, gene finding, protein structure prediction, protein sub-cellular localization, chaos game representation of bio-sequences, bio-sequence compression, systems and synthetic biology, homology modeling and micro-array data analysis etc.
One of the students of the first M.Phil. batch, Sri. Gopakumar G. had the rare distinction clearing the first level of National Certification in Bioinformatics launched by the Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt. of India and conducted by University of Pune. He is known to be the only person in the country to have been successful in the examination, for which hundreds of students appeared.
