Jitendra Singh dedicates the first Indian Biological Data Center to the nation

Speaking on the occasion, the Minister said that as per the Biotech-PRIDE guidelines of the Government of India, IBDCs are mandated to store all life science data generated from publicly funded research in India.

Singh said that IBDC has started the services of submission of nucleotide data through two data portals. ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA)’ and ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive – Controlled Access (INDA-CA)’. “It has accumulated over 200 billion Aadhaar from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research laboratories across India.”

Supported by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), IBDC is established at Regional Center for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad with data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Center (NIC), Bhubaneswar.

It has a data storage capacity of about 4 petabytes and houses the ‘BRAHMA’ High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. Computational infrastructure at IBDC has also been made available for researchers interested in performing computationally-intensive analysis,” the Ministry of Science and Technology said.

The IBDC also hosts an online ‘dashboard’ for genomic surveillance data generated by INSACOG laboratories. The dashboard provides customized data submission, access, data analysis services and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India.

“Data submission and access portals for other data types are under development and will be launched soon,” the ministry said.

IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. It is being developed in a modular fashion, with different sections dealing with particular types of life science data.

“Computational infrastructure at IBDC has also been made available for researchers interested in performing computationally intensive analysis. In addition, IBDC conducts regular workshops and orientations to assist users in data submission,” the ministry said.