An Indian American scientist on Monday said that the application of computers in biology or computational biology was progressing well in India due to its increasing resource of students in the IT field.Computational biology involves application of computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioural, and social systems.

“India is advancing well in computational biology despite a lag in other sectors. The lag is shorter in computational research because such kinds of fields need computers, software analysts and people who can interpret algorithms, whereas other fields need human resources,” systems biologist Bhaskar Dutta from the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told IANS here.

“India has a good amount of qualified people for computational biology,” he said.

He was speaking at a seminar on “Systems Biology and Medicine: An Interdisciplinary Vision for the Future” at the Kolkata-based Institute of Development Studies.

Systems biology is an emerging field in India and is a biology based interdisciplinary study that deals with integration of technology and computation towards a holistic approach complex processes.

“It is a ubiquitous field and therefore has a variety of applications and particularly for India, interdisciplinary research has tremendous scope,” Dutta said.

Comparing the funding situation for students involved in scientific research in the two countries, he said the situation was better in India.

“The funding situation is better here. In the US, the budget hasn’t increased in sync with the pool of scientists. The pool of over-qualified people is much higher,” he said.