Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC)

November 11, 2022

Union Minister of state for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh recently dedicated Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC) to the nation.

What is Indian Biological Data Center?

The Indian Biological Data Center is India’s first national repository for life science data.
It will store all life science data generated from publicly funded research in the country.
It operates with the assistance from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).
In long-term, IBDC seeks to become a major data repository for all life science data originating from India.
It was established at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB) in Faridabad, Haryana. It has a data “disaster recovery” site in National Informatics Centre (NIC) in Bhubaneshwar.
It has a data storage capacity of around 4 petabytes.
It hosts the ‘Brahm’ High Performance Computing (HPC) facility.

What are its objectives?

The objectives of IBDC are:

Provide IT platform for archiving of biological data originating from India.
Develop standard operating procedures for storing and sharing of life sciences data based on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principle.
Perform quality control and curation of data, maintain data backup and manage data life cycle.
Develop web-based tools/APIs for data sharing or retrieval
Organize training programme for analysing of large data and create awareness about the benefits of data sharing.

What are the current tasks of the IBDC?

Since life science data is highly complex and heterogeneous, IDBC is being developed in a modular fashion. This means that different sections deal with different types of data sets. Therefore, the IBDC had initiated nucleotide data submission services via two different data portals – the Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA) and the Indian Nucleotide Data Archive – Controlled Access (INDA-CA).

The IBDC also hosts an online “Dashboard” to archive the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG labs. This online dashboard facilitates customized data submission, access, data analysis, surveillance and real-time monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 variants across India.

The computational infrastructure at the IBDC can be accessed by interested researchers who are involved in computational-intensive analysis. The IBDC will also conduct frequent workshops and orientations to help users submit the data they collected.

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