Year of Establishment: 2007
The Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility (BIF) Centre was established in the year 2007 with financial assistance from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India. The centre is imparting training on bioinformatics to the postgraduate students, research scholars and faculty members of Life Sciences discipline. Besides, it also ensures easy online access of all scientific journals being provided to the university through DBT-DeLCON consortium.
The centre is adequately equipped with computational facilities having 25 desktops, bioinformatics software and 24 hours internet connectivity. The activity of the centre is managed by two regular faculty members of the Life Sciences acting as Coordinator and Deputy Coordinator with active support from a research associate appointed out of DBT grant to the centre. Besides, the centre also provides fellowships to two selected postgraduate students every year to work in the centre on bioinformatics. On the basis of good performance of the centre, the DBT has been given extension to the centre up to 2020.
During last one year, the centre has conducted two workshops on bioinformatics, each of two days duration, for the Postgraduate students of Life Sciences giving hand-on-experience to 41 students on various tools and techniques on bioinformatics. Additionally, BIF centre conducts lectures and hands-on-experience/practical every year for these students covering the bioinformatics related portions of their syllabi.
Besides imparting training on bioinformatics, the centre is also preparing two comprehensive databases from the information gathered from different research projects/works sponsored by various funding agencies. The first database is “Orchid database of Arunachal Pradesh” and the second is “Fish database of Arunachal Pradesh” (being developed in collaboration with Fisheries research group of the Dept. of Zoology).