About The Center: Forest Research Institute –Dehradun received the grant for BIF creation in year 2007-08.The centre has been established in the historical and magnificent main building of FRI. A core group has been created in the institute to take special research initiative for Forest Bioinformatics. FRI is the premier and oldest institute of forestry research in the India as well as in Asia region established by erstwhile British Empire. The Institute also administered training of forest official in the country and after Independence, it was aptly renamed as Forest Research Institute and Colleges. The separate Bioinformatics Centre has been established and working as an interdisciplinary centre of Institute. The BIF have conducted various training programs conducted in biodiversity informatics and bioinformatics since its inception. The bioinformatics centre is working closely with Geomatics centre of institute in spatial biodiversity informatics. The centre is worked in planning commission funded projects, Manipur forest department project and ICFRE funded projects to provide all software and related product delivery.

Research Activities: The FRI has a well-established infrastructure of bioinformatics & GIS laboratory, National Forest library, herbarium, arboreta and experimental field areas for providing scientific and training services. The forest bioinformatics, GIS & RS, genetics & tree propagation, Forest pathology (Molecular plants pathology), plants tissue culture discipline, statistical modeling of biodiversity and Climate Change in respect of forest ecosystem are  main research domain.

Area of Specialization: Forestry Biodiversity Informatics, GIS &RS Bioinformatics, Database of DNA fingerprinting of important tress species like Sal, Deodar, Shisham, Eucalypts etc. , medicinal plants of forests, Forest Products, Forest Soil and Land Reclamation, Genetics and Tree Propagation, Non-wood Forest Products, Plants Pathology, Silviculture, Climate Change

Major Achievements:

• Developed a Web portal of Forest Flora of Manipur:  A Data Base of Ligneous Plants of Manipur including plants identification system.
• A new website of BIF FRI has been launched with url biffridehradun.org
• The BIF Centre developed a National Data portal for Planning Commission (NRAA funded) all India coordinated Projects “Identification of Extent of Forest Lands in Forest Fringe Villages” with its data analysis part.
• Developed the database of forest pathology herbarium (8600 no. of spciemns) and DNA fingerprints  database of Cedrus deodara
• Conducted three training programs on biodiversity informatics for the research scholars and scientists of the institute.
• Developed the dedicated website of FRI Dehradun and national silviculture conference 2014.
• Design & development, up gradation of DD herbarium, (collection of 3,30,000 plant specimens) .
• A three days Workshop cum Training programme on “Application of Bioinformatics in Forestry” was conducted at FRI dehradun in March,2013.

Infrastructure Facilities:

1. Computer & Communication facility : The BIF centre have the 20 Desktop computers, Web server, database server,Color Laser printer, photocopy machine, scanner.
2. Scientific Software packages: STATISTICA, MS-Office 2010 , MySQL server 5.0 , PHP 6, Apache server, (Open source softwares) etc.

 Papers/ published or presented in the conferences :

 Dubey, N. Yadav, S. P. Agarwal and S. S. Kalra, “Novel Strategy for Computational Identification of Micro RNA (miRNA) from Poliovirus,” Research & Reviews: Journal of Computational Biology, vol. 2, pp. 8-12, 2013.

2013. Dubey A, Yadav Neelesh, Kalra SS (2014). Analysis of protein modeling for envelope glycoprotein GP120 for HIV via bioinformatics approaches. International Research Journal of Virology 1(1): 002-006.

• Dubey, U. Shanker, S. S. Kalra, and N. Yadav, “Viral micro RNA analysis via the bioinformatics approaches basis on their Statistics values,” American Journal of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, vol. Vol. 1, pp. 42-66, 2013.

1. One book chapter has been published in book titled “Landscape Fragmentation Restoration Researchers in India” Lap Lambert Academic Publication, ISBN No. –978-3-659-15849-0 with chapter “Forest Conservation through Biodiversity Informatics” by author Neelesh Yadav
2. Vivek Dhar Dwivedi,Shikha Arora, Jyoti Sharma,Amit Pandey, Glycosyltransferase sequence informatics from different source organisms, Online J Bioinform.,13(3):390-398.2012
3. VivekDhar Dwivedi,Shikha Arora,Jyoti Sharma,Amit Pandey,Sequence Informatics of Carbonic anhydrase Enzyme from Different Source organisms. Online J Bioinform.,14 (1): 56-65,2013

• Mohanty, P. S., Harsh, N. S. K. and Pandey, A. , Molecular phylogeny of Ganoderma lucidum isolates collected from northern India, Forest Pathology 42:429-436.2012
• One research paper published in ASIA-PACIFIC Workshop on Water and Forests-Beyond Traditional Forest Hydology , 23-25 Septemebr,2013 at FRI Dehradun as;

1. Neelesh Yadav and R.C.Joshi, “Data Mining Application for Better Management of Forest and Water”, pp. 79,ASIA-PACIFIC Workshop on Water and Forests-Beyond Traditional Forest Hydology , 23-25 Septemebr,2013 at FRI.

 Initiation of R&D activities in Bioinformatics: Since its inception the Centre has focused on R & D activities particularly in the area of biodiversity database  development of computational tools for its storage, retrieval, analysis, interpretation and computer graphic modeling. The centre has also focused on the development of appropriate tools for integrating the information resources of BTIS Centers. The centre is trying to become CoE for Bioinformatics forestry Research.

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