The Sub Distributed Information Centre (SubDIC) at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana was sanctioned by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science & Technology, Govt. of India in November 1998 as a part of Biotechnology Information System (BTISNET) Network to function as a Computerized Information Base in the fields related to Agricultural Biotechnology. The program was initially aimed to establish Computer and Communication Infrastructure Facilities for promoting biotechnology based R & D. The Bioinformatics Centre at PAU became functional in March 2001. Our goal is to promote and utilize the potential of Bioinformatics in crop improvement programme. In the first phase, we have established basic computational infrastructure for supporting the experimental biologist. Within 3-4 years, we have rigoursly worked in the field and familiarized the scientists and students/researchers with the potential application of Bioinformatics. Later on, a super computing facility was setup under the umberlla of International Wheat Genome Sequencing Project funded by the DBT.
Centre has sucessfully completed the 1st Phase with number of publications in the National and International Journals. In July 2021, BIC start its 2nd Phase with financial support form Dept. of Biotechnology, GOI, New Delhi. Now, the centre focus is on the establishment Next Generation Data Analysis facility and develop automatic pipelines and tool to fasten the research in the area of Agricultural Genomics. In the 2ndPhase, our aim is to exvacate the biological information and utilize it in the crop improvement programme by developing new databases and tools.
At present, the centre is functional with one research laboratory, one teaching laboratory having one HPC, three workstations and several dekstop computers, and printers. Beside that the centre is actively engaged in UG/PG Teaching programme and teaching the course on Introductory Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Next Generation Sequence Analysis, Programming in Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics tools and applications etc.