How the young brigade mapped the TB genome ? an inspiring saga of Indian students who can perform like seasoned scientists from any developed country if given some encouragement.
The TB genome contains nearly 4,000 genes. The functions of nearly 1,500 genes were not known. And a flood of information contained in hundreds of published peer-reviewed papers was to be culled out. And for those genes that were not annotated (functions not known), the predicted functions were computationally extrapolated by them.
Quality checks were done onsite by students and their Principal Investigators (PI). The TB gene map was finally produced by combining the already annotated genes and those that were computationally extrapolated.
“Within two days of giving an open call to students to join the Connect 2 Decode (C2D) project, we got about 850 applications. Most of them were from students,” said Mr. Zakir Thomas, Project Co-ordinator. C2D is a part of a large Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project, and Mr. Thomas is the Project Director of OSDD.
“The students were given a small exercise to solve. It was a kind of screening,” said Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj, one of the Principal Investigators of the project. She is a scientist at the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB). About 400 students were selected.
Mapping the TB genome was done by splitting it into five themes, and students were free to choose any of them. Each theme had one Principal Investigator. “All the 400 students made some contribution, but significant contributions came from about 250 students,” said Dr. Bhardwaj.
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