Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB)

The Department of Information Technology and Biotechnology of the Government of Karnataka established the institute in 2001, with financial support from ICICI Bank.

IBAB's first Director, Prof. Manju Bansal, is a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (https://mym2018.ias.ac.in/describe/profile/1528547603085). She was with the institute for the first three years. She was succeeded by Prof. N. Yathindra of the University of Madras in the year 2004. He served as the Director of IBAB until February, 2018. Dr. Hosahalli Subramanya is the current Director of IBAB, since February, 2018.

Originally located at the International Tech Park, IBAB moved to its own campus in the Biotech Park, Electronic City in Bengaluru in June 2009. The two-storeyed academic block of the new campus has (in its first phase) 30,000 sq ft. There is a three-storeyed men's hostel, a four-storeyed women's hostel, and a dining block. In addition, a neighbouring 40,000 sq. ft. life science and med-tech incubator (the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre, or BBC, https://www.bioinnovationcentre.com/). It currently has about 40 startups on its premises.

The institute continues to be supported by the Government of Karnataka's Department of IT, BT and S&T. It has been funded under DST's FIST programme, and has received research funding from the MeitY, Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science & Technology, all of the Government of India. It has been recognized as a Centre of Excellence of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

The institute offered a Postgraduate Diploma in Bioinformatics (starting in 2002), and Biotechniques (since 2003). The bioinformatics course involved 12 months of classes and, in the third term, a six-month internship placement in industry or academia. The biotechniques course involved eight months of coursework and an optional six-month research project. These courses have now been stopped.

Starting in August 2011, IBAB offered an M.Sc. degree in 'Bioinformatics and Biotechnology', recognized by IGNOU, New Delhi. The affiliation of the M.Sc. program was changed to Mysore University starting from 2013 and subsequently to Bangalore University from 2018. In January 2019, the institute started a Postgraduate Diploma in Big Data Biology, a 1-year programme. IBAB has an ongoing Ph.D program in affiliation with MAHE, Manipal and TDU, Bangalore.

IBAB offers short term courses on Data Analytics, Omics and Next Generation Sequencing frequently.

Research work by the faculty has led to several publications in international journals such as Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nucleic Acids Research, PLoS One, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Journal of Biological Chemistry, BMC Genomics, Bioinformatics, Drug Discovery Today and FEBS Journal. It has also led to bioinformatics tools, such as ExPrimer for primer design.

IBAB, in collaboration with Strand Life Sciences, set up a not-for-profit Bio-IT centre in 2011, dedicated to Functional Genomics, Next Generation Sequencing and Computational Biology. Housed at IBAB, the Centre's initial funding came from the MeitY, Government of India and Department of IT, BT and S&T, Government of Karnataka. Various projects at the Centre have been funded by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), all Government of India agencies.

The Bio-IT Centre worked on several India-centric projects, namely sequencing and analysis of diseases prevalent in India, and sequencing and analysis of species that are of particular interest to India and have tremendous biotechnological potential. In late 2011, the Bio-IT Centre announced the sequencing of neem. Besides these, the Centre worked on several other projects, including sequencing of other complex higher organisms, developing bioinformatics and computational pipeline for massive amount of sequencing data, as evident by its publications.

Since 2017, the facility has been fully integrated into IBAB. The Bio-IT center comprises state-of-the-art facility for NGS with the high throughput sequencer Hi Seq 2500. Other equipment in the facility include Hi-Scan (Illumina bead-array) for genotyping and Ion-torrent for NGS and Qubit, C-bot, Covaris, Bio-analyzer and Tape-station for the processing of DNA and RNA samples. The Bio-IT centre provides service to the scientific community in a collaborative program mode or on a purely service basis.

25 companies have availed the incubation services of IBAB, including Symbiosis Biowares, Novozymes R&D, Ixora Biosciences, BioCOS Life Sciences, Geniron Biolabs, Microtest Innovations, MIR Life Sciences, DeNovo BioLabs, Privils, String Bio, Omix R&D Laboratories, Pentavalent, Indoor Biotechnologies, Techsicon Biotech and Plasmatech Solutions.

References

IBAB publications