WE ARE COMMITED TO

The DECODE competition, organised by Novo Nordisk in Aug-Sep 2024, was a two-stage event featuring two distinct tracks: the Statistics Track and the Programming Track. A total of 31 Teams from 16 colleges participated, of which four were from IBAB. One IBAB team, composed of Austin, Zamin and Tania made it to the final round of the Statistics Track while two teams, composed of Lakshya, Ujjwal, and Purvi, and Chiranth, Nimalan, and Vishnu, made it to the final round of the Programming Track. While all teams performed very well, it was the team composed of Chiranth, Nimalan, and Vishnu that came out on top. This marks the second time that an IBAB team has achieved first place in the DECODE competition. Hearty congratulations to the winners!

Prof. Thiyagarajan’s group published their maiden bioinformatics tools server AnnoDUF in the Journal of Proteome Research (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jproteome.4c00251). The exponential increase in the discovery of novel proteins makes it increasingly important to identify and understand their function. To address this challenge, a computational method ‘AnnoDUF‘ has been developed by Prof. S. Thiyagarajan’s group and hosted at the URL: http://bts.ibab.ac.in/annoduf.php. This user-friendly, web-based platform is designed and developed to annotate domains of unknown protein functions (DUFs) as well as any new protein sequence using the position-specific iterative basic local alignment search tool (PSI-BLAST) and data mining techniques. AnnoDUF will aid researchers working in proteomics and related fields, allowing them to enhance the understanding of new proteins as they are discovered. It is accessible to both academic and industrial users.

Prof. Vembar’s group recently attended the “National Congress for Parasitology 2024” meeting organised by IISER-Pune, CSIR-NCL and Savitribhai Phule Pune University, on behalf of the Indian Society of Parasitology. Prof. Vembar was an invited speaker while her team members presented a total of six posters at the Congress. Sowmiya, Aabhas and Raee together won the Best Poster Award for their poster titled “Adaptation of CRISPR/Cas13 RNA-targeting technologies to perform forward genetics in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum“. They were amongst 10 awardees chosen from over 110 poster presentations by researchers from all across India.