Indian Biological Data Bank

Why is in news? Next door to Delhi, a ‘bank’ to store country’s digitised biological data

The government has for the first time set up a digitised repository where Indian researchers will store biological data from publicly funded research, reducing their dependency on American and European data banks.

The Indian Biological Data Center is India’s first national repository for life science data.

It will store all life science data generated from publicly funded research in the country.

It operates with the assistance from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

It was established at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB) in Faridabad, Haryana. It has a data “disaster recovery” site in National Informatics Centre (NIC) in Bhubaneshwar.

The digitised data will be stored on a four-petabyte supercomputer called ‘Brahm’. A petabyte equals 10,00,000 gigabytes (gb).

Objective:

Provide IT platform for perpetually archiving biological data in the country.

Development of standard operating Procedures (SOPs) for storing and sharing the data as per FAIR (FINDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, INTEROPERABLE AND REUSABLE) PRINCIPLE.

Perform quality control, curation/annotation of data, data backup and management of data life cycle.

Development of web based tools/APIs for data sharing/retrieval.

Organization of training programs on ‘Big’ data analysis and benefits of data sharing.