Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2018

Communities

A Glance at Biophysics in India

plinary collaborations among premier and ancillary research institutes in India. For example, computational biophysics has slowly become a natural aid to almost all biological research including high-end X-ray crystallography and NMR spectros- copy and has thus become indispensable to experimental bio- physics. As a current status, there was a major lag in structure determination of higher order macromolecular assemblies in Indian institutes owing to a lack in major resources. With recent establishment of Cryo-EM facility at IISER Trivandrum, IIT Delhi and NCBS Bangalore, significant Indian contributions in ellucidation of higher order macromolecular assemblies is expected in the near future. With the advent of computational resources and their crucial role in high-throughput techniques, India has been leading at the international forefront with exclusively dedicated labs. Various centres have been set up for analysis of very large biological data sets. For instance, C-CAMP (Centre for Cellular And Molecular Platforms) was initiated by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Govern- ment of India, to promote bioscience research and entrepre- neurship. Earlier, the main emphasis was dissemination of information, but recently more efforts are being focused on creation of web-based servers for structure determination (Bhagirath, IIT delhi, and 3D Nus, IIT Hyderabad) and macro- molecular interaction analysis (BAPPL, ParDock IIT Delhi) and novel databases. Today, at generic scale, most technical and dedicated research institutes in India are moderately equipped for performing basic computational and experimental biophysical research. Nevertheless, for other high-end and high-throughput tech- niques, a lot of infrastructural development is still needed. Despite that, it is noteworthy that Indian researchers are able to publish quality research in biophysics along with other thrust areas of science every year. With borders between different sub-areas of science blurring, more maturity and impact of overall research activities could be anticipated in coming years.

In India, biophysics is still an emerging research field that gar- ners the contributions from both experimental and computa- tional biologists. India boasts of prominent Indian biophysi- cists such as Professor J. C. Bose (Bose Institute Kolkata) and N. N. Dasgupta (Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics Kolkata) from its northern region along with Dr A. R. Gopal-Ayengar (Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Department of Atomic Energy, Mumbai) and Prof G. N. Ramachandran (University of Madras and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) from the southern part of the nation. These prominent scientists along with many others have continued to inspire young researchers in India and significantly changed the magnitude of biophysical research in many other Indian institutes. Currently, prima- ry centres of biophysics research in India include the Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs), the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISERs), National Center for Biologi- cal Sciences (NCBS) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Although it was pursued traditionally only by the physicists and chemists with little exposure to biological background, the contemporary biophysics in India is now integral to the bulk of biological research. This rapid change in the earlier trend is mainly due to progressively developing multidisci-

Join us as a 2018 BiophysicsWeek partner We invite you to join us as a partner organization for the third annual Biophysics Week, March 12-16, 2018. The week is a global effort to raise awareness of the field of biophysics, celebrate its accomplishments, and make connections within the biophysics community. By joining forces, we

can work together to make biophysics a better known discipline. This opportunity is only available to international organiza- tions whose missions include the promotion of biophysics. From more information, contact rreid@biophysics.org.

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