PRELIMS SNIPPETS – November 16th 2022

Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC)

Why in News?

  • Government has recently set up ‘Indian Biological Data Bank’ at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad.

Highlights

  • IBDC is the first national repository for life science data in India, where the data will not only be submitted from across India but can be accessed by researchers from across India
  • It Is mandated to archive all life science data in IBDC generated from publicly funded research in India.
  • The data center is supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).
  • It is being established at the RCB in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneshwar.
  • It costed around 85 crore rupees to be set up.
  • The digitised data will be stored on a four-petabyte supercomputer called ‘Brahm’.
  • A petabyte equals 10,00,000 gigabytes (gb).
  • Different sections of IBDC would typically deal with particular type(s) of life science data.
  • Each IBDC section would have dedicated data submission and access schema.
  • IBDC has a backup data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at NIC.
  • Further, IBDC shall also develop highly curated data sets in order to facilitate knowledge discovery in various domains of life sciences.
  • It would also provide infrastructure and expertise for biological data analysis.
  • It currently accepts nucleotide sequences — the digitised genetic makeup of humans, plants, animals, and microbes.
  • There are now 200 billion base pair data in the bio-bank, including 200 human genomes sequenced under the ‘1,000 Genome Project’, which is an international effort to map the genetic variations in people.
  • The project will also focus on populations that are predisposed to certain diseases.
  • It will also help researchers in studying zoonotic diseases.
  • Although the database currently only accepts such genomic sequences, it is likely to expand later to storage of protein sequences and imaging data such as copies of Ultrasound and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
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