The Bioinformatics Laboratory at KICS, Lahore was established using the starter grant from HEC, Pakistan. This laboratory has been catering for the local needs at the university level. In the near future, the Lab aims to provide a national bioinformatics information network designed to cater for the inter-disciplinary and collaborative research needs of the research/scientific community and the industry with the following main objectives:

• To build an integrated information resource platform, prepare databases of biological data and to develop relevant analysis tools and techniques.
• To develop, support and enhance the public information resources for biology in Pakistan, e.g., Genbank, PubMed, molecular biology data and related research information resources.
• To develop appropriate and extensible data models for storing, retrieving and manipulating biological data.
• To develop and maintain quality control and uniform standards for ensuring interoperability.
• To design biological ontologies and use a controlled vocabulary (e.g., keywords and synonyms) and text strings in intelligent data searches.
• To utilize XML /RDF technologies or another explicitly defined parsale format for all information in the database records to ensure interoperability.
• To ensure that the integrity and provenance of information in the database. The database shall be updated at least once a month to incorporate the most recent information and data.
• To establish strong research collaboration and link with scientific community.

Projects Completed

• The group has made available dome public domain biological resources such as Genbank through intranet.
• Development of an extensible data model
• Development of the prototype-based software development methodology for bioinformatics
• Proposing metrics to evaluate Data Provenance.