Joint Indo-American alliance in bioinformatics announced

Dimple Verma
01 February 2003

New Delhi: The US-based Bioinformatics Research Center (BRC) and the New Delhi-based Centre for Development of Knowledge and Awareness (CEDKA) have announced an alliance under the research consortium Joint Indo-American Bioinformatics Alliance (JIABA).

The mutual application of expertise and skills by the two organisations will be augmented by joint research, training and other programmes in the field of multidisciplinary bioinformatics.

The joint research will be done by involving leading scientists and researchers from both countries. Both the organisations will become the nodal agencies for maintaining joint research data that can be used for multifarious applications.

CEDKA and its collaborators will initiate a series of projects to establish communication, joint project infrastructure, and cross-programme training between the faculty, students and their collaborators in India and America. This effort will further support joint bioinformatics research and intellectual transfer between the centres and their collaborators.

The joint research will leverage the expertise of both countries. It will also create new technologies and developments. It will compliment the expertise on basic and applied research. The four projects announced at the launch include:

• Project A: Protein Sequence and Structure analysis
• Project B: Data mining for biomedical research
• Project C: Disease-Oriented research
• Project D: Indian Bioinformatics database development

Says CEDKA director Dr Mahesh Dutt: “ In the age of globalisation, when the whole world has become a kind of small village, the significance of information sharing cannot be underestimated. JIABA is our tool to achieve this very goal of sharing information as a global player.