RISE OF BIOINFORMATICS AND COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY IN INDIA: A LOOK THROUGH PUBLICATIONS

Computational biology and bioinformatics have been part and parcel of biomedical research forfew decades now. However, the institutionalization of bioinformatics research took place with theestablishment of Distributed Information Centres (DISCs) in the research institutions of repute in variousdisciplines by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. Though, at initial stages, this endeavorwas mainly focused on providing infrastructure for using information technology and internet basedcommunication and tools for carrying out computational biology and in-silico assisted research in variedarena of research starting from disease biology to agricultural crops, spices, veterinary science and manymore, the natural outcome of establishment of such facilities resulted into new experiments withbioinformatics tools. Thus, Biotechnology Information Systems (BTIS) grew into a solid movement and alarge number of publications started coming out of these centres. In the end of last century, bioinformaticsstarted developing like a full-fledged research subject. In the last decade, a need was felt to actually make afactual estimation of the result of this endeavor of DBT which had, by then, established about two hundredcentres in almost all disciplines of biomedical research. In a bid to evaluate the efforts and outcome of thesecentres, BTIS Centre at CSIR-CDRI, Lucknow was entrusted with collecting and collating the publicationsof these centres. However, when the full data was compiled, the DBT task force felt that the study mustinclude Non-BTIS centres also so as to expand the report to have a glimpse of bioinformatics publicationsfrom the country. Keywords : Bioinformatics; Computational Biology; India; BTIS Net