Excelsior Correspondent
FARIDABAD (Haryana), Nov 10: Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Ministry of Science and Technology; Minister of State (Independent Charge) Ministry of Earth Science; MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Space and Atomic Energy, Dr Jitendra Singh today dedicated to the nation India’s first-ever National Repository for Life Science data-‘Indian Biological Data Centre’ (IBDC).
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Jitendra Singh said, India is ushering in a new era of disease study and disease management. “Indian data for Indian diseases and Indian treatment regimen for Indian patients” is the dictum. In the times to come, this data bank can also help in carrying out specific gene interventions for management and more importantly, for prevention of Metabolic Disorders like Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus which are now occurring in younger age groups, he said.
As per the BIOTECH-PRIDE guidelines of the Government of India, Dr Jitendra Singh said, IBDC is mandated to archive all life science data generated from publicly-funded research in India.
Supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), it has been established at Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad with a data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneshwar.
It has a data storage capacity of about 4 petabytes and houses the ‘Brahm’ High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computational-intensive analysis. Users can contact the data center by submitting their requests at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in.
Dr Jitendra Singh informed that IBDC has started nucleotide data submission services via two data portals viz. the ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA)’ and ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive – Controlled Access (INDA-CA)’ and has accumulated over 200 billion bases from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research labs across India.
It also hosts an online ‘Dashboard’ for the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG labs (https://inda.rcb.ac.in/insacog/statisticsinsacog). The dashboard provides customized data submission, access, data analysis services, and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India. Data submission and access portals for other data types are under development and would be launched shortly.
Fundamentally, IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. IBDC is being developed in a modular fashion wherein different sections would typically deal with particular type/s of life science data.
The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computational intensive analysis. Users can contact the data center by submitting their requests at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in. Further, IBDC conducts regular workshops and orientations (https://ibdc.rcb.res.in/news-and-announcement/) to assist users in submitting the data. Video tutorials for data submission to IBDC are also available at the data center website. The data center team can also be contacted at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in for scheduling of any workshop on data submission/analysis.
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