Dr. B.K. Das, Director of ICAR-CIFRI and Dr. B.K. Behera, Dean (CoF, Jhansi), inaugurated the program and emphasized the need for Bioinformatics applications in predictive ecology and fisheries to address key areas in aquaculture. Dr. B.K. Das emphasized that there has been a huge effort in the advancement of analytical techniques for molecular biological data over the past decade. This has led to many novel algorithms that are specialized to deal with data associated with biological phenomena, such as gene expression and protein interactions.

In this training program, information on novel bioinformatics tools along with their ‘crossover potential’ with an application to ecology and fisheries data are given. In particular, a focus is made on the development of models that identify functionally equivalent species in different fish communities to predict functional collapse. Various international and national experts from The University of Arizona (USA), Udayana University (Indonesia), Chinese Academy of Life Sciences (China), ESPOL (Ecuador), Manipal School of Life Sciences, OUAT, Nucleome Informatics and BioXplore Labs (India) were invited to deliver the lecture and gives hand-on training on various techniques of bioinformatics.