The Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), based in

Chandigarh Chandigarh () is a planned city in India. Chandigarh is bordered by the state of Punjab to the west and the south, and by the state of Haryana to the east. It constitutes the bulk of the Chandigarh Capital Region or Greater Chandigarh, which a ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, is one of the constituent establishments of the

Council of Scientific & Industrial Research The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research ( IAST: ''vaigyanik tathā audyogik anusandhāna pariṣada''), abbreviated as CSIR, was established by the Government of India in September 1942 as an autonomous body that has emerged as the ...

(CSIR). It was established in 1984. The institute is engaged in research in many areas of modern

biological sciences Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary ...

and microbe-related

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used ...

, with special emphasis on research that is interdisciplinary and of a collaborative nature, such as

immunity Immunity may refer to: Medicine * Immunity (medical), resistance of an organism to infection or disease * ''Immunity'' (journal), a scientific journal published by Cell Press Biology * Immune system Engineering * Radiofrequence immunity desc ...

and

infectious disease An infection is the invasion of tissues by pathogens, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agent and the toxins they produce. An infectious disease, also known as a transmissible disease or communicable di ...

protein design Protein design is the rational design of new protein molecules to design novel activity, behavior, or purpose, and to advance basic understanding of protein function. Proteins can be designed from scratch (''de novo'' design) or by making calcul ...

and engineering, fermentation science, microbial

physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

and

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

yeast Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom. The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and at least 1,500 species are currently recognized. They are estimated to constit ...

biology, bioinformatics, microbial systematics, exploitation of microbial diversity for bioactives and

enzyme Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as products ...

s for

biotransformation Biotransformation is the biochemical modification of one chemical compound or a mixture of chemical compounds. Biotransformations can be conducted with whole cells, their lysates, or purified enzymes. Increasingly, biotransformations are effected w ...

s. Present Director is Dr Sanjeev Khosla, and former directors were Dr Anil Koul, and Dr Girish Sahni.

Facilities

The institute is equipped with facilities for modern biology research. They include lab-to-pilot-scale fermenter of many capacities, tissue and cell culture facility, facility for maintenance, preservation and identification of micro-organisms, an animal house, workstations for bioinformatics and biocomputing, equipment for protein and DNA analysis, a library with around 64,000 references books, microscopy equipment, and databases for intellectual property management. The institute is equipped with biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory facility for research work on pathogenic microorganisms.

Achievements

Patented natural, recombinant and clot specific Streptokinase as a vital lifesaving drug.

Academics

The institute offers Ph.D. jointly with the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, Gaziabad(ACSIR).

Computational Resources for Drug Discovery

CRDD ( Computational Resource for Drug Discovery) is a module of the in silico module of Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD). The CRDD web portal provides computer resources related to drug discovery on a single platform. This module is developed and maintained under the guidance of

Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava is an Indian bio-informatician and head of computational biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology. Personal Early years and education Raghava was born in village Nagla Karan, Bulandshahr dist ...

at CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology.

Controversy of fake data

On 17 Jul 2014, mainstream media in India published reports about retraction of a total seven papers published by scientists at IMTECH in various journals. This was done after establishing that the data used in these papers were fake/fabricated. This came as a huge shock to the scientific community in India since CSIR and its constituent bodies are considered to be among the top research organizations in the country.

Bioinformatics services

More than 150

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, databases and web-servers has been developed at the Institute of Microbial Technology,

. These servers are heavily used by scientific community worldwide.

References

External links

* {{authority control Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Research institutes in Chandigarh Microorganisms and humans Medical research in India Research institutes established in 1984 1984 establishments in Chandigarh