Bio informatics is a subject that has extraordinary promise not just in the design of drugs and therapies but also in the basic understanding of life itself. It is the application of information technology to the management of biological data and is a rapidly evolving scientific discipline.
It encompasses research, development and application of computational tools and aims at expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioural, or health data. Hence data is acquired, stored, organized, archived and then analysed. Bio informatics relies on statistical methods.
Specialized work is carried on in drugs research, agrochemicals, hybridization, plastics and petroleum derivatives, environmental remediation etc.
Nature of Work
Bio informatics performs two critical roles : develops IT tools embodying novel algorithms and analytical techniques, or applies existing tools to achieve new insights into molecular biology in testing, documentation, running operating procedures and database administration, programming, software development, algorithm creation and scientific visualization. Bio informatics can be applied to all areas of life sciences and other fields like energy and textiles, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. Bio informatics is used for treatment of genetic diseases. Knowledge about the method in which drugs work at the genetic level finds applications in the treatment of cancer as well as infectious diseases like AIDS. Bio-informatics also throws light on toxicogenomics, a speciality that tries to find an answer as to why drugs work better on some patients than on others. Using bio informatics, drugs can be developed much faster to facilitate as well as accelerate the treatment of diseases.
The experiment on cloning is also an area of bio-informatics.
Study & Training
Bio informatics course covers : Introduction to genetics, molecular and cell biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, microbiology, evolutionary biology ; fundamentals of bio informatics ; branches and application areas of bio informatics ; use of software tools and databases available on the web ; Sequence analysis ; Protein modeling.
In addition to the above, depending on the standards of the institution, some introduction is also made in areas that influence the bio informatics :
Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) Fingerprinting and computer science, MS Office, Linux, HTML and Perl. Students of bio informatics are expected to be proficient with knowledge of Java, Unix, C, C++, RDBMS such as Oracle and Sybase, CORBA, Perl, CGI and web scripting is required at the IT end.
Graduates in Computer Science, genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, mathematics, physical chemistry, pharmaceuticals, floriculture, statistics, electrical engineering, biotechnology or organic chemistry are suitable for this programme.
The Government of India through the Department of Biotechnology is also taking up certain initial steps with regard to bio informatics education in India. The Department has drafted a National Bio informatics Policy 2002 and has collaborated with IIT Delhi to launch a two-year M Tech. Course. More than 70 universities are connected through a network for a first ever supercomputing facility in the country for Bio informatics and computational biology.
Centre for Bio technical Technology in collaboration with a private computer-training institute has launched a one-year postgraduate diploma course with an assurance that fifty per cent of the students would be absorbed in various projects. The qualifications for eligibility are M.Sc. in life science, MBBS, B.Tech or MCA.
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