Mission & Goals
  • Information and communication technology infrastructure development
  • Digital library
  • Tools and standards development for managing large data
  • Business process support infrastructure
  • Capacity building and HRD development
  • R & D in scientific informatics
    • Competency
  • Chemoinformatics
  • Biodiversity informatics
  • Metadata and clearinghouse techniques development.
  • Scientific database - data mining and knowledge management
  • Web technology implementation
    • People
  • Dr. Krishnan (Head)
  • Dr. M. Karthikeyan
  • Mr. N.B. Dahibhate
  • Ms. Vaishali Sangade
    • Facilities

    NCL has an excellent campus wide local area network with about 500 computers, a range of servers and a good connectivity to the internet. Besides an excellent library, the laboratory provides access to a range of digital resources including databases like Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents, Chemical Business Newsbase on the intranet and online access to a large number of electronic journals (including back volumes for many) from leading publishers like Elsevier Science, American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry and Wiley Interscience. NCL library has an excellent collection of print as well as electronic resources. Its collection includes approximately 1.3 lacs books and subscription to around 250 journals. The division also offers information related services like document delivery of patents and journal articles, searching of specialized online databases and translation of scientific documents from a range of languages into English.

    The Digital Information Resource Center will provide :

  • User room with a range of computers for easy and common access to digital information resources, productivity and other office tools, compute resources, visualization and modeling facility and access to special devices like scanners, CDwriters, etc.
  • State-of-the-art classroom facility with PCs or workstations on each desk for human resource development and capacity building training.
  • Server room with high performance servers managing centralized ICT services and information resources.
  • Computer laboratory to set up experimental systems and test / evaluation platforms, software and applications.

    • Glimpses of current research

    Besides infrastructure activities, the information division is actively involved in research and development programmes in “scientific informatics”.

    Chemoinformatics

    Chemoinformatics involves the application of IT to chemical information and data for the discovery of novel chemical entities. Chemoinformatics is about presenting and integrating a vast and complex array of information. Chemoinformatics methods can be used proactively to design and filter the most appropriate compounds to work with in the real world.

    Current activities:

  • Virtual molecule generation and use of large collection of molecular structures with both experimental and predicted physico chemical properties
  • Compact storage and retrieval of chemical structures, efficient 2D and 3D representation and searching from very large (billions) collections of molecular structures
  • Database of chemical structures with predicted properties
  • Chemical Information locator and extractor from public resources
  • ChemVista.org and ChemVista.net Indian portals for Chemoinformatics
  • Automation technology for inventory applications: Barcoding chemical structures


    • Future directions:

  • Establishing distributed computing environment for molecular properties predictions through computational techniques for Internet and Intranet users
  • Development of software tools for chemical information harvesting from internet and other chemical databases
  • Establishing CME (Chemoinformatics Molecular Environment) and chemical communication forum for internet and intranet users
  • Molecular information and database access through ChemVista for scientific community
  • Intranet based property prediction
  • Protein shape search for drug discovery

    • These initiatives will assist chemists to build and assemble their own tools for mining the chemical data quickly through chemical structure based interface. Apart from enhancing ongoing research activities this will also help to capture organizational knowledge over a period of time

    Biodiversity informatics

    Biodiversity informatics is a new and emerging discipline. Biodiversity constitutes diverse disciplines, with dynamism and complexity as its major features. It has isolated data and distributed data sources, with gaps in collection and error in precision of information. Hence, it poses challenges to information and communication technology. Our mission is “to develop tools and standards, and to help improve infrastructure and capacity building to accelerate national progress in collection, collation, analysis, prediction and dissemination of knowledge about Indian biotic resources and its environ to make their sustainable use”

    Current activities:

  • Global species directory on Indian fauna
  • SAMPADA a software for biological collections management
  • Biological collections markup language (BCML)
  • Biodiversity portal (http://www.ncbi.org.in)
  • Databases on sacred groves, biological collections, and conservation sites
  • Capacity building through workshops and schools


    • Future directions:
  • To develop multi-dimensional observation & recording tools
  • Tools for taxonomic retooling and identification
  • Standards and protocols for biodiversity data management
  • Tools for analysis, modeling, prediction and forecasting tools
  • Tools for visualization and virtual reality of ecosystems
  • Application of mobile computing for data collection and dissemination