Abstract

The pursuits in Computational Genomics: A journey since 2010, at SCBB CSIR-IHBT

Ravi Shankar, Scientist & Coordinating Faculty, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology

With the advent of high throughput sequencing, the computational practices can now deliver answers to deep questions important in understand the living systems. Since its birth in year 2010, Studio of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (SCBB) has been active in some of the most important areas in computational genomics in plant system including de novo transcriptome discovery and analysis using NGS data, understanding the miRNAs and developing some advanced algorithms to find miRNAs, their targets and networks, and important advances in understanding plant regulomics. The associated presentation covers the methods and analysis protocols developed at SCBB using which several transcriptomes were resolved, solution to discover miRNAs directly from sRNA-seq data without any reliance upon the availability of genome/reference sequences, a tool to discover miRNA targets accurately, sRNAs and their associations with DNA methylation and repetitive contents, and finally a solution platform for plant regulomics analysis. In overall, it becomes very apparent that next generation sequencing has become an indispensable resource to address vast amount of previously unanswered questions of different types, from resolving transcriptome to understanding the regulatory dynamics of existence.