Dept. Biochemistry University of Dhaka
Visiting Bengal for the holidays I didn’t expect a thriving bioinformatics community. Yet, that’s exactly what I found when Dr. Haseena Khan invited me to visit her lab at The University of Dhaka. The Jute Genome Project was a consortium of academia, industry, and government which had sequenced & analyzed the Jute plant.
What Dr. Khan and her researchers lacked in cutting-edge equipment, they made up in passion, ingenuity & thorough knowledge of the most miniscule advancements in the field. After spending the day with them Dr. Khan insisted I meet with the industrial wing of the project.
Tucked away amidst one of the most clustered places on the planet, there are a few small buildings covered in plants, within them incredible things are happening.
Lush green home of scientists, developers & supercomputers at DataSoft
DataSoft Systems Ltd. created a sub-division, Swapnojaatra (dream journey) which would “put scientists, developers, and supercomputers in one room and throw away the key” as Palash the Director of Technology for DataSoft would tell me. Although the Jute Genome Project is now complete, the developers of Swapnojaatra are hooked on informatics. From the minute we met they were excited to show what they had done (within lines of existing NDAs) and ask what was new in the field from San Francisco. Indeed, the team here had discovered genomic re-assortment of the influenza virus, performed molecular docking studies of pneumonia and created many of their own informatics tools.
For a well-educated, computer savvy, developing region bioinformatics is a near perfect industry. With low overhead costs, compared to traditional wet-lab sciences and endless data being generated in more economically developed countries, it’s only a matter of time. Bengal and bioinformatics may have been made for each other.
Citations:
A Putative Leucine-Rich Repeat Receptor-Like Kinase of Jute Involved in Stress Response (2010) by MS Islam, SB Nayeem, M Shoyaib, H Khan DOI: 10.1007/s11105-009-0166-4
Molecular-docking study of capsular regulatory protein in Streptococcus pneumoniae portends the novel approach to its treatment (2011) by S Thapa, A Zubaer DOI:10.2147/OAB.S26236
Palindromes drive the re-assortment in Influenza A (2011) by A Zubaer, S Thapa ISSN 0973-2063
Petri Dish Talk 