At present the university comprises three institutes, 14 faculties and 114 departments, and four multidisciplinary schools, one of them being the School of Biotechnology. The School of Biotechnology was started in 1986 with an aim to provide sound theoretical and experimental training in Biotechnology for meeting the future needs of manpower in the biotechnology industries. The major emphasis is laid in the areas of plant biotechnology, immunology, microbial biotechnology, bacterial genetics, molecular genetics and enzyme technology. Several research projects funded by the Department of Biotechnology, DST and various other national and international funding agencies are running in the School of Biotechnology.

The Bioinformatics Centre at the School of Biotechnology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi, was set up in 1989 as one of the distributed Information Sub-Centres (DISCs) under Biotechnology Information System (BTIS) programme of Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. The centre was established with an objective to work as a resource institution in the area of biotechnology. The Centre is equipped with state-of-the-art hardware and software. Both V-SAT and INTERNET facilities are available at the centre for the use by the scientific community.

In a span of fourteen years of its existence, the centre has emphasized the use of databanks in the area of its specialization. Important among these databanks are those on protein and DNA sequences and so on. The centre provides training to the users by conducting seminars and workshops. The contribution of the centre to the activities of the university is in terms of teaching the M.Sc. Biotechnology Students a regular course on "Computer Applications".

• Comparative and Functional genomics: Genome of Azospirillum brasilense is being analyzed for the regulatory cascades and networks that control signal perception, transduction and change in gene expression. In silico prediction of protein-protein interactions among sigma factors, anti-sigma factors and anti-sigma factors are being made to understand the systems biology.
• Homology modeling, protein-protein interaction and protein-drug interaction: Structures of enzymes such as ?-amylase, asparaginase, ?-galactosidase, ?-lactamase etc are generated by homology modeling.
• Molecular Microbial Diversity: Using methods based on nucleotide sequence of 16S rRNA genes microbial diversity has been characterized from human tissues samples, aquatic and desert plants, coalbeds and from contaminated sites.
• Bioprospecting of novel genes by metagenomics: Clone library from the DNA from the metagenome of the coalbed microbes has been prepared and sequenced to find novel genes that might produce industrially important enzymes.
  
  For more detail visit: http://bioinformaticsbhu.tripod.com