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This new field is making waves throughout the world and is being tipped as the field of the millennium. It is surely going to be a vital link in the imaginative world of Bioscience innovations. In short, we can picture it as a 'conjugation of Information Technology & Biosciences'. What exactly is bioinformatics? Call The utility of Bioinformatics ranges from the use of genomic information in understanding human, drug discovery, handling huge databases, Biodiversity studies to its application in evolutionary and phlogenetic studies. Due to this, many universities, government institutions, pharmaceutical firms and IT companies have expanded. Bioinformatics is an emerging scientific discipline that uses information technology to organize, visually analyze and distribute biological information in order to answer complex biological questions. Bioinformatics tools enable researchers to cope with the increasing flood of biological data and to answer a variety of biological questions in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional analysis techniques. The spectacular rise of commercial genomics industry and the broadening application of genomic techniques in biology and medicine has created a commercial market for bioinformatics software, hardware and services.
By some estimates the total market for Bioinformatics tools and services, including custom databases, could exceed $60 Billion within five years. Bioinformatics is becoming a directly investable theme. Reports from market research firms say that there are now more than 50 companies which offer Bioinformatics products and services of various kinds to external customers. Bioinformatics Market Share Although Bioinformatics is a very new market, its market captivity is more than expected. Major business players are rushing into Bioinformatics business as the business opportunity provided by Bioinformatics is a promising one. Surprisingly Bioinformatics is sitting on a larger market pie, which is expected to grow out of expectations. Employment opportunities
The voluminous amount of genetic data generated every second in the world from various sources needs sophisticated hardware with expert softwares to manage and process the voluminous data requires highly skilled work force. Bioinformaticians are paid the industry's best pay packages. Education...
The Bioinformatics family tree... As in other Bioscience filed, this "hybrid" field has its own variants ranging from Biomedical informatics, cheminformatics, medical informatics, epitope informatics... Are we getting it right in India?
Ashwin Sivakumar
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it Biomolecular Informatics, Computational Biology or Bioinformatics...it is all the same. Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology for managing biological data. Computers analyze and integrate biological and genetic information associated with various allied Bioscience areas. The demand for Bioinformatics has been on a rising trend especially due to the publicly available genomic information resulting from the Human Genome Project which deals with determination of the sequence of the entire human genome. (The DNA that constitutes the total genetic information content in an organism is called genome).
Bioinformatics Market
Bioinformatics has a very different opportunities picture. Not only businesses are flourishing, to keep the Bioinformatics business on the fly, there is a need for highly skilled multi-disciplinary man power. Bioinformatics industry is in acute shortage of workforce with a blend of disciplines like Biology, chemistry, biophysics, mathematics and computer science. As the technology evolves there will be more subjects collaborating with it.
Let us now shift our focus to training. In India, many fallacious training ventures have cropped up aimed at short-term business which will have to be guided against to prevent any negative repercussions in the future. Proper guidance is to be aquired before taking a decision on getting trained in a private Bioinformatics training provider. Although there are relatively few Colleges/Universities offering Bioinformatics courses in India as compared to the number of aspirants, the trend will change very quickly with the rate of progress of this field.
India is probably the hub of Information technology nowadays. Considering this, India will be amongst the best in Bioinformatics in the near future. But yes, a cautious and a guided approach is the need of the
hour. When it comes to training we should not go beyond limits. It should be prevented from going the way other Engineering and Science courses have gone in India. There has been sheer over-production of graduates in those fields due to the increasing number of private colleges. This will surely deplete the quality of Bioinformatics training as well as job
opportunities. Talent spotting has been another problem in India. Science graduates are often not given enough opportunities to express themselves. It is important to groom Bioscience graduates properly and equally with the Engineering candidates. It will be interesting to note the trend in this field in the next couple of years. Let us wait and watch.
