Workshop on bioinformatics held

Mangalore, February 10: A one day workshop on 'Biological Databases and Sequence Analysis Tools' was conducted by St Aloysius Institute of Management and Information Technology (AIMIT), St. Aloysius College, Centre for Bioinformatics, supported by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India.

The aim of the workshop was acquainting students with the available Biological resources on the World Wide Web and demonstrating the practical applications of Bioinformatics by providing hands on training on the same.

As many as 50 students from third year B Sc Biotechnology and one faculty member from St. Aloysius College, Mangalore attended the workshop. The aim of the workshop was to introduce the applications of Bioinformatics and provide hands on training on the various tools and analysis packages.

The workshop was inaugurated by Rev Fr. Denzil Lobo, Director of AIMIT. Students were introduced to various Biological databases by Prof Deborah Vijay, Department of Bioinformatics, AIMIT. Students were then acquainted with the Structural databases and Molecular visualization tools by Ms. Shreya John DCruz, student of 4th Semeter Msc Bioinformatics. This was followed by a lecture on Alignment and Analysis of Biological sequences by Mr. Lanwin Lobo, Lecturer, Department of Bioinformatics, AIMIT. During these sessions various concepts such as biological databases, visualization tools and sequence alignment algorithms were discussed. The morning session concluded at 1:00 PM with an interactive Question and Answer session where the resource persons clarified the doubts and queries of the participants.

The afternoon session began at 1:45 PM where participants were given demonstrations and hands on session on various databases, visualization tools and sequence alignment and analysis tools. This was followed by a talk on “Higher Education, Research and Career prospects in Bioinformatics”, delivered by Prof. Santosh Rebello. The workshop concluded at 5:15 PM with the distribution of certificates to all the participants