Bioinformatics Centre at IARI,
New Delhi was established in 1989 under Biotechnology
Information System (BTIS) Network to function as a computerized
information base in fields related to Agricultural Biotechnology
in particular and fields allied to agriculture in general.
Since its inception, the Centre has provided various services,
such as online and offline bibliographic search through
network and CDROM server, electronic mail, internet, creation
and updation of database, statistical analysis of research
data, protein sequence analysis, training programmes,
workshops on bioinformatics and current awareness services
etc., to the researchers, students and farmers.
A number of Bioinformatics
tools were developed at the centre as well as a number
of databases along with information retrieval system are
functional at the centre. The Centre became a part of
Unit of Simulation and Informatics (USI) in November 2003.
The USI is entrusted with the additional responsibility
of maintaining the Institute’s campus network, the
website and the web server administration. While initiating
the work on e-agro-advisory in 2007, the Centre has released
the quarterly News Letter entitled “Agro-Bioinformatics”
that was widely circulated to various Institutes as well
as Universities and all visiting dignitaries since 2008.
During the year under report, M.Sc programme in Bioinformatics
is approved by the academic council of this institute.
Major research activities
Wheat Informatics : The web based application ‘Wheat
Informatics’ has been developed which enables
the target user to retrieve general, scientific, bioinformatics
and other information (such as R & D institutes,
landmark publications) about wheat. This application
is user’s friendly and will help the students,
researchers and even the farmers to know complete
detail related to wheat.
Genome Browser: A genome browser was developed
for wheat. The configuration file of GMOD was customized
for this purpose. Wheat genome sequences & putative
wheat EST sequences were obtained from plant genome
database, wheat protein sequences were obtained from
Uniprotdb. All these sequences were supplied as input
to the MARKER (genome annotation pipeline). The GFF
files obtained as output from MAKER were uploaded
into a mySQL database, using standard Bioperl loading
script.
MiRule : MiRule (Rule based micro RNA prediction
Tool) was developed. MiRule predicts the presence
and position of the mature miRNA in the input precursor
sequence. MiRule predicts the mature miRNA by assigning
weights for different derived rules. The results of
miRule are encouraging since the essential attributes
selected are biologically significant. MiRule has
been optimized for predicting mature miRNAs in Hexapods
and tested for major cereal crops with high precision
and recall.
Plant Transmembrane Kinase prediction Tool: A plant
Transmembrane kinase prediction tool was developed.
Plant Transmembrane kinase prediction tool helps in
predicting the presence of transmembrane receptor
kinase like domains in the sequence provided by the
user. It predicts on the basis of Hidden Markov Model
profiles and runs Hmmer 1.2 in the backdrop. The tool
has been found to have a fair accuracy and perform
better than Pfam in predicting various groups and
families of the transmembrane receptor kinase class.
CeRA (Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture)
has been established under the NAIP for providing
online access to e-journals and resources in over
120 ICAR institutes. We provide various journals related
to Biotechnology and Bioinformatics to DICs /Sub DICs
under ICAR.
