India gets first national repository to archive life sciences data

Union Minister of state for Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh dedicated India’s first national repository for life science data ‘Indian Biological Data Center’ (IBDC) to the nation on Thursday, at Faridabad.

Addressing the occasion, the minister said that as per the Biotech-Pride guidelines of the Government of India, IBDC is mandated to archive all life science data generated from publicly-funded research in India.

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

Supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), IBDC is established at Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad with a data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneshwar.

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

IBDC also hosts an online ‘Dashboard’ for the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG labs. 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 shortly,” the ministry added.

IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. It is being developed in a modular fashion wherein different sections would typically deal with particular type/s of life science data.

“The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computationally intensive analysis. Further, IBDC conducts regular workshops and orientations to assist users in submitting the data,” the ministry said.