The largest distributed network of bioinformatics centres in the world: Biotechnology Information System Network (DBT-BTISNET)

The spread of bioinformatics centres across India is primarily due to the extensive infrastructure and network that was initiated way back in 1980s by S. Ramachandran, the first Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, and is being supported at 168 locations across the country. Anticipating the dawn of bioinformatics globally as an integration of informatics and biology, the seeds were sown by the linkage set up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) led by N. Seshagiri (Director General of NIC), in a remarkable collaboration with DBT. As with biotechnology, strong teaching initiatives by DBT at the post-graduate level across the country helped in the growth. The recent bioinformatics certification examinations and the consequent fellowships are part of a seminal exercise that tries to provide standards in an area which saw unregulated mushrooming growth in the last decade. Unlike in the USA and Europe, where bioinformatics was nucleated by sequence analysis, in India the strong crystallography and biophysics structural background from the tradition of G. N. Ramachandran resulted in the initial tilt of bioinformatics in India towards structural perspectives. The Biotechnology Information System Network (BTISNET) captured through development of databases, by the centres distributed across the country, recording the diversity of biological resources in the country. The advent of mega sequencing and the large-scale import of genomics and proteomics technologies resulted in the growth of many bioinformatics groups and companies, several of which have connections to the centres of the BTISNET. Following the bioinformatics policy document, the recent years have seen the nurturing of the North Eastern Bioinformatics Network and also international collaborative ventures with countries in Asia and Europe. The trend of an admixture of experimental and computational biology approaches that are needed for systems and synthetic biology is becoming common and signals the next phase of expansion and integration of the bioinformatics network.