Indian Biological Data Bank: Biobank to Create Indian Data for Indian Solutions

 What’s in today’s article:

• About IBDC
• News Summary

Why in news?

• The Union Ministry of Science and Technology recently dedicated to the nation India’s first digitised repository for life science data – Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC), at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad, Haryana.
• This will enable researchers to store biological data from publicly funded research, reducing their dependency on American and European data banks.

The Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC):

• About IBDC:
  • According to the Government of India’s BIOTECH-PRIDE guidelines, IBDC is mandated to archive all life science data (in digitised form) generated from publicly funded research in India.
    • In India there is no specific guidelines for storage access and sharing of Biological data.
    • The Biotech PRIDE Guidelines will facilitate this and enable exchange of information to promote research and innovation in different research groups across the country.
    • These guidelines will be implemented through the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC) at Regional Centre for Biotechnology supported by the Department of Biotechnology.
  • The data centre, which is India’s first national repository for life science data, is supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre (NIC), India.
  • The digitised data will be stored on a four-petabyte (1 petabyte = 10,00,000 gigabytes (gb)) supercomputer called ‘Brahm’.
  • The biobank also has a backup data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Centre (NIC)-Bhubaneswar.
  • The database offers open access (can be used by other researchers from across the country) and controlled access (data will not be openly shared for a number of years) mechanisms for data submission to researchers.
• Need:
  • Currently, most Indian researchers rely on the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information to store biological data.
  • Other smaller datasets are available at some institutes, but they are not available to all.
• Objectives:
  • Provide an IT platform for permanent archiving of biological data in India.
  • Development of SOPs for storing and sharing the data as per FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) principles.
  • Perform quality control, data backup and management of data life cycle.
  • Development of web-based tools, organisation of training programs on ‘Big’ data analysis and benefits of data sharing.
• Significance:
  • Because of the heterogeneity of life scientific data, IBDC is being built in a decentralised manner, with various portions dealing with specific types of data.
  • It would also provide infrastructure and expertise for biological data analysis, aiding in knowledge discovery of numerous genetic diseases, vaccines and medicines.
  • As a result, it will always strive to meet the needs of not just the Indian, but also the global scientific community.

News Summary:

• The biobank now contains data including 200 human genomes sequenced as part of the ‘1,000 Genome Project,’ an international endeavour to map genetic variations in people.
• In addition, the database comprises the majority of the 2.6 lakh Sars-Cov-2 genomes sequenced by the Indian Sars-Cov-2 Genomic Consortium (INSACOG).
• The database will also house the 25,000 mycobacterium TB sequences, helping in understanding the spread of multi-drug and extremely drug resistant TB in the country and aiding in the search for targets for new medicines and vaccines.
• Currently, the database contains the genomic sequences of crops such as rice, onion, tomatoes, and mustard, among others.
• The presence of genomes from humans, animals and bacteria in the same database would also aid researchers in the study of zoonotic diseases (spread from animals to humans).
• It is probable that the database will later be expanded to store protein sequences (amino acids) as well as imaging data such as ultrasound and MRI images.

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