Trainings & Workshops
Summary and recommendations of the “AI in protein design” meeting
The virtual meeting on “AI in Protein Design : Opportunities & challenges” was held on March 19th 2024 from 2-5pm, on Zoom
List of participants :
● Debasisa Mohanty, NII
● Anurag Agrawal, Ashoka
● Gautam Menon , Ashoka
● Alok Bhattacharya, Ashoka
● Richi Mahajan, DBT
● Lipi Thukral, IGIB
● Shachi Gosavi, NCBS
● Dinesh Gupta, ICGEB
● Dilip Kumar, Ashoka
● Subhashis Banerjee, Ashoka
● Partha Pratim Das, Ashoka
The experts made presentations on the work that they are involved in as well as the
current state of the field internationally. The summary of the remarks is not provided here, as the recording is available for viewing.
There was a consensus that India should develop capacity in this area and target development of applications.
It was also felt that at the present state we have to make an effort to bridge the gap in computing power,
to increase the availability of trained manpower and to ramp up funding support.
We need to build expertise in relevant algorithms and computation as well as in our understanding of biology and the availability of data.
Some key action items and recommendations of the group :
1. AI in protein design requires expertise in both biology and
software/AI/computational aspects. Usually these are done by disjoint groups of people who do not talk to each other.
We need more two way communication/cross talk between the biology experts and the computational experts. A specific suggestion is to organize more joint workshops.
2. It was felt that we need to develop groups/consortiums that would have expertise to carry out a protein design project end-to-end, that is, from design to validation and finally application.
This approach will help to develop optimum design that will be functionally active.
3. It was felt that funding agencies should support groups/consortiums that have formulated such an integrative approach from design to validation.
4. We need expertise in developing new algorithms and or in taking open source ones and modifying them to suit our requirements. For this we would need close collaboration with computer scientists and protein chemists.
5. We can possibly start a monthly journal club with participation from faculty and students from the various organizations which participated in the meeting, to keep the community updated with the fast paced progress in the field.
Materials for the hands on Workshop on Computational & Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems, held on 02ndAugust2023, is now available at bit.ly/handson_workshop_23_materials
Virtual Workshop on Computational & Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems
Centre for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology invites you to a 2-day virtual workshop on :
“Computational & Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems” on 31st July & 1st August 2023
Register at : https://bit.ly/AU-MBS-2023
You will receive the zoom meeting link a couple of days before the workshop.
Online Hands-on Workshop on “Next-generation Sequencing: Fundamentals, DNA Variant Calling and RNA-Seq Expression Analysis” : March, 2022
A 3-day online hands-on workshop session (3-5 March, 2022) in computational biology with a focus on next-generation sequencing analysis emphasising on genomics and transcriptomics field was conducted. Concepts from fundamentals including data mining and quality check to pipeline design for omics data study and analysis was designed and covered using an open-source computing platform.
Virtual Workshop on “Modeling Biological Systems” : May, 2022
This workshop was concentrated on the use of models in multiple contexts in biology, teaching both the computational background and as well as the techniques required for research in this field.
Training Programs
Summer Internship Program: June 2022
The Department of Biology and the Centre for Bioinformatics and Computation Biology,
at Ashoka University conducted a week-long internship program (19 to 25 June, 2022) in biological sciences with a strong focus on cell, molecular, and computational biology for Bachelor’s students from various Institutes and Universities.
Bioinformatics Training Program
