India rolls out first biology data repository

India has readied its first biological data centre that seeks to store every type of life science data generated in publicly funded research without any infringement on intellectual property.

Funded by the Department of Biotechnology, the Rs 100 crore Indian Biological Data Centre at Faridabad has begun accepting nucleotide data and would start receiving protein data after another six months.

Subsequently, data on the human genome, crop genome, RNA, medical imaging, disease and surveillance data would be stored in the unique facility.

Also Read | Centre’s science conference under fire for promoting Panchmahabhoot

Housed in the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, it is the first national repository for life science data and has a data storage capacity of about four petabytes. It has Brahm supercomputers and a disaster recovery site at National Informatics Centre, Bhubaneshwar.

"We received around Rs 100 crore from the Department of Biotechnology to set up the centre. The IP of the data remains solely with the owner of the data,” Sudhanshu Vrati, RCB executive director told DH. “Most of the INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV2 Consortium on Genomics) work was carried out at the data centre.”

IBDC is being developed in a modular fashion wherein different sections would typically deal with particular types of life science data. For instance, the nucleotide data submission services can be accessed by two portals - depending on the level of access requirement.

The first portal - Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA) - is actively synced with the INSDC (International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration) repositories like GenBank (US repository), ENA (European Nucleotide Archive) and DDBJ (DNA Databank of Japan), and is simultaneously assigned accession IDs from both IBDC and INSDC repositories.

But data submitted to the second portal - ``Indian Nucleotide Data Archive - Controlled Access (INDA-CA) - is not shared with any international repositories and remains under 'controlled access' as per the user requirement. "It is more like a bank where the user would decide who can access the data. Users are free to submit data to any of these repositories as per their need," Vrati said.

Currently, both portals have accumulated over 200 billion bases from 2,12,357 submissions from more than 50 research labs across India.

Sources said the DBT might modify its funding rules to ensure that every project funded by the department submits the biological data at the IBDC. The biotechnology department may also initiate a dialogue with the Indian Council of Medical Research to convince the clinical research funding agency to submit their data.

ICMR’s persistent refusal to share its genome sequencing data with other INSACOG laboratories was one of the key reasons behind a delayed official recognition of the seriousness of the Delta wave that killed lakhs of Indians.