The Centre for Bioinformatics in Pondicherry University was started initially as Sub Distributed Information Centre of the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India (DBT) in 1991. The mandate of the Centre was to train manpower and conduct research in various areas of Bioinformatics. Recognizing the progress made by the Centre, DBT upgraded the Centre to a full Centre (DIC) level in 2002 The Centre was identified as a Centre of Excellence for Research and Training in the field of Bioinformatics by the Department of Information Technology, Govt. of India, New Delhi in 2007 and awarded a special grants.
The Centre is offering an M.Sc., program in Bioinformatics in 2007 supported by the University Grants Commission (UGC) under the scheme of “Innovative Programme – Teaching & Research in Interdisciplinary and Emerging Areas”. To advance research in Bioinformatics, the Centre started Ph.D. Programme in 2009. The Centre started offering a Network M.Sc., Computational Biology teaching programme fully funded by DBT in collaboration with Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai and Anna University, Chennai in 2010. This programme will be first of its kind in the country. This programme has been upgraded to M.Tech,. Computational Biology from 2014 and offered in collaboration with Anna University. Most of the past students were placed in various leading research institutions and industries. Many of them are perusing higher studies abroad.
In the past few years, Centre has taken up research activities in the areas of sequence analysis, molecular modeling, structural biology, database development etc., and several papers have been published in peer-reviewed International and National Journals. The faculty and students have received projects/fellowships from various funding agencies like Department of Biotechnology, Department of Information Technology, University Grants Commission, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-JRF/SRF, Department of Science and Technology, Bioinformatics National Certificate (BINC), DST-Innovation in Science pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) and Rajiv Gandhi Fellowship.
The University supported the Centre with a state of the art building of about 35000 sqft with complete UPS backup for all rooms and a solar power for the lighting load. The building is having 3 computational labs, 13 Faculty rooms, 13 individual research labs for faculty, common wet lab, common instrumentation room, Library, 3 class rooms and a seminar hall.
Under MoU the following Faculty are recognized supervisor for Ph.D. programme
Dr. Basant K Tiwary
Dr. Dinakar R. Ampasala
Dr. P.T.V Lakshmi
Dr. R. Krishna
Dr. M. Suresh Kumar
Dr. A. Murali
