BOL

New advances in biology are being made at a rapidly increasing pace, largely due to new technologies and a large amount of automation. The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology has brought in a new dimension to understand the molecular basis of a living organism. The Next Generation Sequencing technology enables sequencing of hundreds of genomes at an extremely rapid rate and at a significantly lower cost. The availability of hundreds of genomes in a short time is expected to revolutionize area of life sciences. A number of new methods like de-novo sequencing, resequencing, transcriptomics etc. are emerging in the Next Generation Sequencing area. These technologies have a tremendous applications is various areas of Human Health, Agriculture, Livestock and Environment.

The pace of sequencing is leading to a data overload and therefore the ability to analyze is much beyond the existing computing capabilities. This tsunami of data has led to a sea change in the storage and computing requirements. In order to gear up to tackle these challenges most biologists are adopting the use of cyberinfrastructure. Cyberinfrastructure is a combination of data resources, high-speed networks and high performance computing resources that bring people, information and computational resources together to perform science in this information driven world.

The last few decades have witnessed the evolution of biology from what used to be a purely experimental field, to a high end computational domain, where unrelenting computational power is required to decipher pieces of data generated through high throughput techniques into blocks of information that will help to answer many mysteries of life. To be able to generate knowledge from the oceans of genomic data, enabling technologies like High Performance Computing, Grid Computing and Cloud Computing are the latest weapons in the hands of the modern biologist.

This symposium intends to bring together researchers in various domains of human health, agriculture, livestock and environment who are using advanced computational biology tools to solve scientific problems in their respective domains.

More at Accelerating Biology 2013:The Next Wave (20-22 February, 2013) , CDAC, Pune.