India’s first national repository for life science data, ‘Indian Biological Data Center’ (IBDC), established at Faridabad, Haryana, was dedicated to the nation on Thursday.

Speaking on the occasion, union minister of state (independent charge), ministry of science and technology, Dr Jitendra Singh said that as per the BIOTECH-PRIDE guidelines of the Government of India, IBDC is mandated to archive all life science data generated from publicly-funded research in India.

Supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), it has been established at Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad with a data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneswar.

It has a data storage capacity of about 4 petabytes and houses the ‘Brahm’ High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computational-intensive analysis. Users can contact the data center by submitting their requests at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in

Dr Jitendra Singh informed that IBDC has started nucleotide data submission services via two data portals viz. the ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA)’ and ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive - Controlled Access (INDA-CA)’ and has accumulated over 200 billion bases from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research labs across India.

It also hosts an online ‘Dashboard’ for the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG labs (https://inda.rcb.ac.in/insacog/statisticsinsacog). The dashboard provides customized data submission, access, data analysis services, and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India. Data submission and access portals for other data types are under development and would be launched shortly.

Fundamentally, IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. IBDC is being developed in a modular fashion wherein different sections would typically deal with particular type/s of life science data.

The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computational intensive analysis. Users can contact the data center by submitting their requests at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in. Further, IBDC conducts regular workshops and orientations (https://ibdc.rcb.res.in/news-and-announcement/) to assist users in submitting the data. Video tutorials for data submission to IBDC are also available at the data center website. The data center team can also be contacted at support@ibdc.rcb.res.in for scheduling of any workshop on data submission/analysis.