Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics scientist employed in government research institutes and hospital get salary as fixed by government. It can be Rs 1 lakh to 2.5 lakh a year depending upon work profile and experience. Those working in private sector pharmaceutical companies or multination companies get a pay scale of Rs 4.5 - Rs 6 lakhs per annum.

Bioinformatics professionals are absorbed in pharmaceutical and Biotech companies, premier scientific research institutes of public and private sector. They can also work with government and private hospitals and in the industries manufacturing various bio-medical products. One can also take up teaching jobs in public and private colleges offering bioinformatics as a subject. The scope of bioinformatics is in areas like database design and maintenance, sequence assembly, proteomics, clinical pharmacologist, sequence analysis, informatics developer and bio-analytics. Bioinfromatics is a versatile, vibrant, futuristic and important field, rich in applications. Today an extensive Bioinformatics Network, covering 120 institutions, spread geographically all over India has been established. The Network is creating human resource in Bioinformatics and carrying out research in different areas of Bioinformatics. Scientists of this network have published more than 1000 bioinformatics research papers in peer reviewed journals in last five years and helped in publishing more than 3000 research papers in biology/biotechnology. The network has also helped directly or indirectly several Bioinformatics companies in India. The scientists from the network have participated in major national millennium technology initiative projects of CSIR such as Biosuite of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) or software packages for visualization of bioinformatics data by Strand Genomics. The BTISnet is the first network which established BioGrid India of large bandwidth and high speed connectivity among various institutions in the country and also high performance national computing facility. Thus, this unique network has showed that India can work in network consortium mode. Some of the employers in Bioinformatics in India are TCS, Silicon Genetics, IBM Life Sciences Pubgene, Wipro, Reliance, and Tessella.

Dr. Mani Lal Bhaumik, the USA-based physicist who invented the vision correction laser technology and won the Padma Shri this year for his work in science and engineering, has a dream. It's a bold and expensive dream and a hard one to turn into reality. Bhaumik is on a ten-year mission to produce ground-breaking research in bioinformatics and energy science in India. "The ultimate goal," he says, "is to produce a Nobel Laureate from India".

A lot of academicians time is spent teaching bioinformatics course during the academic year. Because of the growth in bioinformatics, much of their time is spent at meetings; planning programs, planning for hiring, managing programs, selecting students for programs. Curriculum development and planning for new programs are the key area where a bioinformatics professors spends time. In research, a certain amount of time is spent every day getting updates in the literature, finding out what is new, exchanging the researched points with students and thinking about particular problems the institute is interested in. Right now we are interested in getting better predictions of RNA secondary structure. Travel is another big thing - going to meet people and trying to figure out what is important to work on in the bigger community and how our work stacks up with others’ work.