Saturday, April 2 2005 12:13 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: In a major contribution to science, researchers at the Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB) in Bangalore have helped to decipher the human X chromosome leading to identification of dozens of genes.

The results of the path breaking study, jointly with a team from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, have been published in the April issue of the international journal "Nature Genetics".

"This is the acid test that the bioinformatics efforts in India can be internationally competitive," Akilesh Pandey, chief scientific adviser to IOB and also an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins said in an e-mail interview.

"To my knowledge, this is the first time that any Institute has provided an independent analysis of any human chromosome and is the first real large-scale bioinformatics effort of human genome from any research organization in India," Pandey said.

The research at the IOB was financed internally without any funding from any Indian agency, Pandey said. For 18 months, 26 scientists of the Indo-US team poured through the publicly available sequence of the X-chromosome to identify genes and other important parts of its DNA.

By comparing human X-chromosome to genetic information from chimpanzees, rats and mice, the team uncovered dozens of new genes, many of which are located in regions of chromosome already tied to various diseases, according to the report.

Their results, as well as data created by other scientists confirm the existence of some of the newly identified genes.