ISLAMABAD: (Parliament Times) Biological science is rapidly transforming into the data oriented science with the invention of high through put data techniques to produce vast amount of data. This vast amount of biological data encodes lot of secrets in its complexity which can only be un-winded with the help of advance statistical and machine learning techniques. These biological insights are of considerable importance biologically by improving the healthcare and food sector as well as politically in order to design the future government policies. The world has felt the need to save this high throughput data in the late 80’s and early 90’s with the creation of databases like NCBI, EMBL-EBI AND DDBJ. This has lead to the plethora of database creation and now most of the biological databases in the world are hosted by countries like USA, UK, Germany, China and japan and is a reason they are leading the biological research in the world.
Dr. Shakira Ghazanfar, a Senior Scientific Officer at National Institute for Genomics and Applied Biotechnology, Islamabad is isolating the bacterial strains from the gut of our local buffalo (Nilli Ravi) from long, her lab is equip with advance wet lab techniques to isolate the probiotics strains and she had recently carried out the whole genome and metagenome data analysis to jump down at the genomic level of the animal probiotic activity. This NGS based approach has recently started to produce vast amount of genomic data. This high throughput genomic data of our local strains has opened a new opportunity for Pakistan to lead the world in the animal probiotics research by managing this data well. This has led us to start a project of building Pakistan’ First Animal Probiotic Database: “PAPD” to store this vast amount of data. The database will store data that can be analyzed for years to get the insight and will ultimately put Pakistan under the list of global leaders in the field of animal probiotics.