Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.
Structural bioinformatics is the branch of bioinformatics that is related to the analysis and prediction of the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules such as proteins, RNA, and DNA. It deals with generalizations about macromolecular 3D structures such as comparisons of overall folds and local motifs, principles of molecular folding, evolution, binding interactions, and structure/function relationships, working both from experimentally solved structures and from computational models. The term structural has the same meaning as in structural biology, and structural bioinformatics can be seen as a part of computational structural biology. The main objective of structural bioinformatics is the creation of new methods of analysing and manipulating biological macromolecular data in order to solve problems in biology and generate new knowledge.
An epitope, also known as antigenic determinant, is the part of an antigen that is recognized by the immune system, specifically by antibodies, B cells, or T cells. The part of an antibody that binds to the epitope is called a paratope. Although epitopes are usually non-self proteins, sequences derived from the host that can be recognized are also epitopes.
In academia, computational immunology is a field of science that encompasses high-throughput genomic and bioinformatics approaches to immunology. The field's main aim is to convert immunological data into computational problems, solve these problems using mathematical and computational approaches and then convert these results into immunologically meaningful interpretations.
Igor I. Goryanin is a systems biologist, who holds a Henrik Kacser Chair in Computational Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He also heads the Biological Systems Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
The Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), based in Chandigarh, India, is one of the constituent establishments of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). It was established in 1984.
Søren Brunak is a Danish biological and physical scientist working in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical informatics. He is a professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen and professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. As Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, he leads a research effort where molecular-level systems biology data are combined with phenotypic data from the healthcare sector, such as electronic patient records, registry information, and biobank questionnaires. A major aim is to understand the network biology basis for time-ordered comorbidities and discriminate between treatment-related disease correlations and other comorbidities in disease trajectories. Søren Brunak also holds a position as a Medical Informatics Officer at Rigshospitalet, the Capital Region of Denmark.
Reverse vaccinology is an improvement of vaccinology that employs bioinformatics and reverse pharmacology practices, pioneered by Rino Rappuoli and first used against Serogroup B meningococcus. Since then, it has been used on several other bacterial vaccines.
Ram Samudrala is a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the University at Buffalo, United States. He researches protein folding, structure, function, interaction, design, and evolution.
Computational Resources for Drug Discovery (CRDD) is an important module of the in silico module of Open Source for Drug Discovery (OSDD). The CRDD web portal provides computer resources related to drug discovery, predicting inhibitors, and predicting the ADME-Tox properties of molecules on a single platform. It caters to researchers researching computer-aided drug design by providing computational resources, and hosting a discussion forum. One of the major objectives of CRDD is to promote open source software in the field of cheminformatics and pharmacoinformatics.
PSI-blast based secondary structure PREDiction (PSIPRED) is a method used to investigate protein structure. It uses artificial neural network machine learning methods in its algorithm. It is a server-side program, featuring a website serving as a front-end interface, which can predict a protein's secondary structure from the primary sequence.
Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, also known as SCFBio IIT Delhi, is a center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology in Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. This facility was established in 2002 under the aegis of the Department of Chemistry, IIT Delhi. It is recognized as a center of excellence in Bioinformatics by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India.
Jeffrey Skolnick is an American computational biologist. He is currently a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Biology Professor, the Director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology, the Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, the Director of the Integrative BioSystems Institute, and was previously the Scientific Advisor at Intellimedix.
Narayanaswamy Srinivasan was an Indian molecular biophysicist and a professor and the head of Proteins: Structure, Function and Evolutionary Group at the Molecular Biophysics Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his researches in the fields of computational genomics and protein structure analysis. An elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India, he is a J. C. Bose National fellow of the Department of Biotechnology and a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Science and Technology. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2007, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Srinivasan Ramachandran is an Indian biologist, bioinformatician and a senior principal scientist at the department of genome analysis of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. Known for his studies in the field of data analytics, Ramachandran is also an adjunct faculty, senior Principal Scientist and AcSIR Professor at the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences in 2007.
Debasisa Mohanty is an Indian computational biologist, bioinformatician and a staff scientists at the National Institute of Immunology, India. Known for his studies on structure and function prediction of proteins, genome analysis and computer simulation of biomolecular systems, Mohanty is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies namely the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2009.
Dibyendu Sarkar is an Indian biochemist, molecular microbiologist and a Chief Scientist at the Institute of Microbial Technology. He is known for his studies on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterial pathogen causing the disease of tuberculosis. His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and Google Scholar, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 23 of them. He has also delivered invited speeches which included the Second Annual Meeting on Infectious Diseases held at the Indian Institute of Science in September 2017. He is an elected member of Guha Research Conference and a recipient of the Raman Research Fellowship of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2011.
Debasis Dash is an Indian computational biologist and chief scientist at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB). Known for his research on proteomics and Big Data and Artificial Intelligence studies, his studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 120 of them. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2014. He was appointed as the director of Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar on 18 May 2023.
Ashwani Kumar is an Indian microbiologist and the Senior Principal Scientist at the Institute of Microbial Technology (ImTech). He is known for his studies on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis. His laboratory focuses on understanding the reasons for drug tolerance observed in humans. His laboratory hypothesizes that tuberculosis is a biofilm infection, so its treatment needs the administration of multiple drugs for at least six months. The Department of Science and Technology has awarded him Swarnajayanti Fellowship for 2016–2017. Department of Biotechnology has awarded him the National Bioscience Prize (2017-18). He was also selected for DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship. He was elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, in 2022. For his contributions in tuberculosis pathogenesis, he was awarded with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology 2022. He is considered as one of India's Leading Scientist in the field of Tuberculosis and his lab is doing some of the best research in India.
Namasivayam Gautham is a retired Professor Emeritus at the Centre of Advance Study in Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras. He is known for his work on DNA Crystallography, protein structure prediction and molecular docking.
