School of Information Technology consists of (a) The Bioinformatics Centre, (b) Computer Centre and (c) Communication & Information Service, of which the last two are science oriented Centres.

The Bioinformatics Centre was established in Jawaharlal Nehru University under the “Biotechnology Information System” Programme funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

Its initial objective was simply to take care of all the information technology related requirements for genetic engineering and thus to act largely as a resource centre for the biotechnologists and biologists. Over the years the objectives have undergone significant changes to keep pace with the ongoing technological developments in biology. The Bioinformatics Centre was made the hub of the School of Information Technology in 2000. Presently, the centre is involved in active research and teaching and boasts of output and quality matching international standards. The School also houses two fully services oriented units, namely, the Centre for Communication and Information Service and the University Computer Centre. These units cater to the University’s computational and network communication related needs.

Among the several developments that have revolutionized the biologists thought and way of working, some of the recent ones are sequencing of the human genome which was almost immediately followed by the development of biological chips: DNA Microarrays, GeneChips(R), protein chips, and others.

Sequencing of human genome (and several others) led to nonbiological problems for the assembly of sequenced fragments and for making sense out of the assemblies. The problems of determining the function genes, and before that finding the start and end locations of genes, introns, exons, and regulatory elements, among others, took a significant part of biology out of the wet lab into the realm of computers. This aspect of informatics or the in silico biology necessitated induction of nonbiologists in biology and tense collaborations among people who would not see eye to eye before. The collaboration, however, took off rather well bringing about the field now known as “bioinformatics”. The collaborations resolved several problems and brought more and more biological problems in the in silico realm. The trend continues with huge biological databases becoming available on the Internet.

The information explosion from genome sequencing projects and sequence analysis related problems was fueled further by development of biological chips. DNA Microarrays and gene chips allow genome-wide expression profiling. Protein chips allow study of interactions among large number of proteins. These chips have completely revolutionized the study of cancers and other genetic diseases. Identification of molecular markers for diseases and molecular (re)classification and discovery of new disease classes are some of the new aspects studied. The credit for success goes to the tools of the bioinformatician who might have come from almost any nonbiological background, e.g., physics, mathematics, engineering, or computer science.

Current developments in bioinformatics permit either full or partial in silico examination of a large number of biological and biomedical problems. Drug design has become computational to a very large extent, almost fully in its initial phases. Nearly all aspects of protein folding problems are either fully or partially in the domain of in silico analysis. With the expanding in silico aspect of biology, the primary impact of bioinformatics on the industry has predictably been reduction in both the time and the costs involved in research and development. With the anticipation of DNA chips reaching the clinic in not-too-distant future, geared for personalized medicine, the role of the skilled bioinformatician can hardly be undermined.