Centre for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics (U.I.E.A.S.T.)

About Centre for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics (U.I.E.A.S.T.)

Panjab University is one of the renowned universities of India which was established in the year 1882 at Lahore and after independence shifted to Chandigarh. The University has always taken the lead in starting new courses/departments. The Centre of Systems Biology & Bioinformatics was established at Panjab University, Chandigarhin 2007.

With the coming up of new innovations/technology, Systems Biology and Bioinformatics has not only come out with supremacy in today's scientific world but also have an impact on day-to-day life. The frontier of biological and medical sciences is full of opportunity today. It is widely appreciated that present-day biomedical researchers are confronted by vast amounts of data from genome sequencing; microscopy; high-throughput analytical techniques for DNA, RNA, and proteins; and a host of other new experimental technologies. Coupled with advances in computing power, this flow of information enables scientists to computationally model and analyze biological systems in novel ways. Therefore, bioinformatics is seen as an important ingredient in biomedical sciences and their related industries. The primary objective of the bioinformatics research program is to inspire new research in data mining through computational analysis of biomedical data.

Systems Biology
System biology is an emerging field that aims at system level understanding of biological systems. Identifying all the genes and proteins in an organism is like listing all parts of an aeroplane. Such a list provides a catalog of the individual components, but, by itself it is not sufficient to understand the complexities underlying the engineered project. But to understand how a particular system functions, one must first examine how the individual components dynamically interact during operation. Thus, it is essential to know the design principles, circuit patterns and how to improve system performance in terms of system structure, system dynamics, control method and design method. Thus, System Biology is an interdisciplinary subject and heavily depends on computational sciences, genomics, bioinformatics measurement technologies and integration of such discoveries with existing knowledge. It has applications in molecular biology, physiology and medicine.

Bioinformatics
The aim of bioinformatics specialization is to familiarize students with biological data, their storage and analysis. The aim of bioinformatics specialization is to familiarize students with biological data, their storage and analysis. In particular, students are expected to understand what information can be extracted from biological data (e.g., information related to phylogenetic tress, metabolic networks, protein structure and function, developmental process, genetic correlation of diseases etc.) and what techniques can be used for getting desired information. The students are trained for employment in system biology and bioinformatics sector of pharmaceutical and biotech industries and for entry in research programmes.

Thrust Areas of the Centre:

1. Cancer Biology and Genomics
2. Conformational studies of peptides using ab-intio quantum mechanics based approaches; Homology modeling, functional characterization of proteins; Sequence based phylogenetic clustering and structure prediction; Toxicology.
3. Neuronal Cell biology,Proteomics and Microarray data analysis
4. Statistical Modeling, Biostatistics, Statistical Genetics