Cloning, Expression & Purification of Proteins  

One of the objectives of OSDD is to establish a centralized repository of high-quality verified research clones of M. tuberculosis that can be distributed to OSDD scientists to aid in their research. First set of ~ 200 targets for cloning have been chosen from the drug targets identified by various in silico and experimental approaches by the OSDD Community as a part of C2D Phase I. Institutes like, The Centre for Genomic Application (TCGA) in New Delhi, SASTRA University in Tamil Nadu, Acharya Narendra Dev Collage (ANDC) and Miranda House at New Delhi participated and collaborated in order to accomplish the task. Significantly, about 100 students from across India participated in this task in a first of its kind crowd sourcing activity involving wet lab work. So far 100+ genes of M. tuberculosis have been cloned and validated and are available and procedures are presently being worked upon to hold the clone stocks, and enable their distribution to the research community. In addition, this project also trained over 100 bachelor and master students in various aspects of experimental design, lab work and analysis.

Chemistry and Chemical Synthesis of Small Molecules

OSDDChem is the open collaborative initiative to create a national repository by synthesizing large number of compounds for screening against TB and Malaria. OSDDChem aims at tapping in the potential of organic chemists in various academic and research institutes and universities in the country and training undergraduate and postgraduate students in modern synthetic reactions and encourage them to enter the field of research on neglected tropical diseases. Submissions of synthesized molecules to the repository are based on the website created especially for this program. The projects are peer reviewed, commented on and funds are sanctioned online. Well-characterized pure molecules are taken up by Central Drug Research Institute (CSIR–CDRI) for screening. Students will be able to see the biological screening data for their compounds on the OSDD portal. Students who do well are to be rewarded points or certificates and research output could lead to publications as well.

Under this venture OSDD outreach center at CSIR- National Chemical Laboratory (CSIR-NCL) Pune, has successfully conducted training of the first batch of selected students. 14 students who underwent the training have been awarded certificates in June 2012.

CSIR-National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology (NIIST) and Academy of Chemistry Teachers (ACT) has also conducted a national workshop organized in March 2012. Under this program, 10 selected students were given training and support for their dissertation work from April to June 2012.During this period the students synthesized 60 compounds and that has been submitted for screening to CDRI. Along with this activity, a CSIR-OSDD training program on In-silico analysis of Organic Molecules for Druggability and Mtbactivity was also conducted at CSIR-NIIST

Cheminformatics and Chemical Data Mining

This innovative research group with more than 400 registered members seek to address the challenge of identifying molecules available in large online digital repositories with desired set of drug like properties, using computational tools. The project concentrates on two aspects of drug discovery: namely Cheminformatics that uses chemical descriptors and data mining approaches to discover and mine novel molecules with desirable properties and Data Curation that involves curation and integration of chemical data and annotation from various data sources in standardized formats. Cheminformatics research group has focused on developing open software based models to screen the bioassay data and develop an open toxicity prediction tools. The team is now focused on development of algorithm for the massive virtual screening of all the molecules in publically available databases.

Volunteer Computer Grid and Softwares 

    

OSDD is backed up by robust hardware infrastructure and GBPs bandwidth connectivity through National Knowledge Network (NKN) and grid computing facility –GARUDA, that is being provided by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), one of the primary R&D organization under Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, India. CDAC’s Garuda Grid is targeted at providing a facility for the scientific community, which would enable them to seamlessly access the distributed resources and overcome the barricades of bandwidth issues. Garuda grid can manage any number of concurrent user jobs. The Galaxy workflow that has been integrated with Garuda enables the users to submit any number of jobs at one time and not be hassled with power problems or maintenance.