E-Paper
C-DAC holding symposium on ‘Accelerating Biology 2023’ from Feb. 28
The Bioinformatics group of C-DAC Pune is organising a three-day symposium on ‘Accelerating Biology 2023: Discovery to Delivery’ from February 28 to March 2, 2023
PUNE: The Bioinformatics group of C-DAC Pune is organising a three-day symposium on ‘Accelerating Biology 2023: Discovery to Delivery’ from February 28 to March 2, 2023.
At a press conference held Monday at C-DAC Pune, E Mangesh, director-general, C-DAC, said, “The symposium will include talks by eminent scientists from academia and industry, and will address challenges in the areas of In-silico drug discovery and repurposing: designing the blockbuster, quantum and Exascale computing, Multiomics in healthcare, Ayurveda and traditional medicine, biological data integrators, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biology and medicine, and collaborations and industry and startups. As part of the symposium, C-DAC will be releasing two software tools that are important for life sciences’ researchers in the country.”
“The life-science data generated from Indian studies on humans, animals, plants and microbes is of tremendous strategic importance to national security. This data is also crucial for novel drug and vaccine development that leads to effective and precise public healthcare solutions. Around the world, many nations have built the capability to store and analyse large amounts of genomics data like NCBI, RBI, DDBJ etc. India needs to build a strong capability to develop such large facilities with modern hardware and software that are able to handle large genomics data,” said Mangesh.
“‘Integrated Computing Environment’ is an indigenous, cloud-based genomics computational facility for Bioinformatics. The ICE integrates ICE-cube, a hardware infrastructure, and ICE-flakes, a software component that will help to store and analyse petascale to exascale of genomics data in a secure manner. Integrated Computing Environment will help researchers uncover the complete potential of the data to deliver India-specific products and solutions in healthcare, agriculture, livestock, and the environment,” Mangesh said.
Along with Mangesh, Rajendra Joshi, senior director, C-DAC, shared details of the two products slated to be released on the occasion of the symposium. Dr Debasisa Mohanty, director, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi; and Dr C S Yajnik, professor and director, diabetes unit, KEM Hospital and Research Centre, Pune, will be formally launching the molecular dynamics visualisation and analysis tool developed by the Bioinformatics group of C-DAC during the three-day symposium, Mangesh and Joshi shared.
Joshi said, “Enabling biologists to visualise and analyse large volumes of biomolecular structural data resulting from experiments and simulations will surely accelerate research in the field of computational drug discovery. The use of high-performance computing to analyse this large time-scale relationship data through the rapid rendering of structures in 3D space gives the finest understanding of biology for new discoveries.”
The Bioinformatics group at C-DAC Pune provides high-end solutions to various academia and industries using high-end supercomputing facilities and serves as a platform for a number of national and international collaborations.
