IIT Kharagpur
Decoding Gene Regulatory Networks: Role of Bioinformatics in Understanding Structure, Function, and Evolution with a Focuson Human Diseases at IIT Kharagpur
The Bioinformatics Center at IIT Kharagpur is actively engaged in cutting-edge research aimed at comprehending the structure, function, and evolution of regulatory networks, with a specific focus on human diseases.
The primary objectives of this center include designing of databases and web servers, creation of skilled manpower through training and workshops, and conduct research addressing important aspects of gene regulation. Their overarching goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the role of gene regulatory networks in human diseases, with a particular emphasis on developing algorithms for early detection tools in various human diseases.
In pursuit of these goals, the center has successfully developed web servers and databases for characterizing, classifying, and predicting protein-RNA interactions. Notable examples include NCodR, a multi-class support-vector machine classifier of non coding RNAs in Viridiplantae; Nucpred, a machine learning classifier for predicting protein-binding nucleotides; and EpICC, a Bayesian neural network model for accurate cancer type classification. These databases and web servers are freely accessible to the scientific community and can be utilized in the study of various diseases, especially neurodegenerative diseases. The center actively conducts workshops, seminars on diverse bioinformatics areas, and provides short-term training to students. A one-day symposium on ‘GN Ramachandran Lecture Series on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology’ serves as part of their manpower development program. The workshops and training programs organized by the center contribute significantly to the development of human resources in these proposed areas
The computational facility at the center comprises of several High-Performance Computing (HPC) servers and workstations, ideal for conducting state-of-the-art bioinformatics research. Multiple web servers and databases developed by the center are publicly available at http://www.csb.iitkgp.ac.in/bioinformatics_centre/index.html. Furthermore, the center leverages advanced machine learning techniques to develop prediction models, which are implemented in these web servers. Their expertise extends to building highly efficient computational pipelines for analyzing large datasets and utilizing machine learning to construct prediction models.