The Interactive graphics facility was established in 1990-'91 to facilitate
structure determination and analysis of biological macromolecules. Since
its inception, the facility provides the requirements of scientists working
in various interdisciplinary areas of modern biology, such as macromolecular
crystallography, structural bioinformatics, structure and dynamics of biomolecules,
intermolecular interactions and protein engineering. The facility was the
first of its kind to be established by the Department of Biotechnology
(DBT) Government of India and was expected to provide a focal point for
advanced studies in computer graphics based molecular modelling in our
country. It has set the pace for the establishment of several more such
facilities by the DBT in different parts of India.
The facility aims to provide an interface between biological computational
modeling techniques and experimental results. The facility caters to the
requirement of scientists concerned with diverse but inter-related areas
such as structure and dynamics of biomolecules, inter-molecular interactions,
protein engineering and rational drug design. Through its usage and taking
advantage of the considerable expertise available at the Institute, it
should be also possible to impart high level training to researchers involved
in biomolecular modeling and related activities.
Facilities
At present, the Interactive Graphics facility has one VGX super graphics
workstation along with other necessary peripherals namely, stereo viewer,
image recorder, colour and black & white laser printer. All the necessary
state-of-the-art graphics packages are available in the above said machine.
They are FRODO, "O", RIBBONS, AMBER, CHARMM, QUANTA, INSIGHT (Discover,
Homology), MOLSCRIPT, BOBSCRIPT and RASMOL. In addition, the facility has
several programs for sequence analysis and multiple sequence alignment.
