Design and development of portal for biological database in agriculture

Abstract

The application of novel and modern techniques in genetic engineering and genomics has resulted in information explosion in genomics. Three major genome databases under International Nucleotide Sequence Database collaboration NCBI, DDBJ and EMBL have been providing a convenient platform for submission of sequences which they share among themselves. Many institutes in India under Indian Council of Agricultural Research have scientists working on biotechnology and bioinformatics research. The various studies conducted by them, generate massive data related to biological information of plants, animals, insects, microbes and fisheries. These scientists are dependent on NCBI, EMBL, DDBJ and other portals for their sequence submissions, analysis and other data mining tasks. Due to various limitations imposed on these sites and the poor connectivity problem prevents them to conduct their studies on these open domain databases. The valued information generated by them needs to be shared by the scientific communities to eliminate the duplication of efforts and expedite their knowledge extended towards new findings. A secured common submission portal system with user-friendly interfaces, integrated help and error checking facilities has been developed in such a way that the database at the backend consists of a union of the items available on the above mentioned databases. Standard database management concepts have been employed for their systematic storage management. Extensive hardware resources in the form of high performance computing facility are being installed for deployment of this portal.