Daijiworld Media Network – Mangalore (SB)

Mangalore, Nov 19: A daylong national workshop on bioinformatics tools and softwares was conducted by St Aloysius Institute of Management and Information Technology (AIMIT) here at St Aloysius College, recently.

Fr Denzil Lobo SJ, director of AIMIT inaugurated the workshop. The first session began with introductory presentation on bioinformatics and sequence analysi by Deborah R and Umamageswari that included important programmes and underlying algorithms. This was followed by hands-on training using the online sequence analysis tools like local alignment, global alignment, BLAST, FASTA, and multiple sequence alignment.
 

The next session was completely dedicated to Structural Bioinformatics. There were presentations and online demonstration of structural databanks that included PDB and MMDB databases. Following this, a demonstration was given on the visualization softwares like Rasmol, SwissPDB viewer and Cn3D. 

The Bioinformatics Centre is set up by the department of biotechnology and ministry of science and technology, government of India. The centre at St Aloysius College has initiated such training programmes to enhance the capability of teachers of biology and research scholars to use the tools provided by bioinformatics to understand biology and also do high end research in biology.

The Bioinfo Centre is planning to hold workshops in BioPerl, drug design and other related subjects in the future. St Aloysius College is one of the few colleges which offers master’s degree programme in bioinformatics. There are plans to start high-end research centre to promote bioinformatics.