the goan I network
PANAJI
Padma Bhushan Prof Padmanabhan Balaram, an Indian biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, inaugurated the XLII (42nd) All India Cell Biology Conference (ISCB) on the theme of ‘Trends in Cell and Molecular Biology’ at BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus. The conference was being held for the first time in Goa and was organised by the department of Biological Sciences of BITS
Pilani Goa Campus.
The conference aimed to provide opportunities and bring together acclaimed cell biologists, biochemists, molecular biologists and computational biologists to a common platform to present their exciting and new findings; also to establish research and to find global partners for future collaboration.
The goal of the conference was to push the frontiers of cellular response to various stresses, cytotoxicity, molecular revolution in cancer management and approach to computational system biology. Cutting-edge technical developments and new paradigms in eukaryotic cells were discussed with a view to fostering interactions between graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and established investigators across the world.
‘Cancer’ is still one of the most challenging diseases across the world and there was a special session is contributed to understand the upcoming development in this field, nationally and internationally.
‘Nanotechnology’ has also gained much importance in today’s treatment of some important diseases. The discussion was not only related to how this technology is beneficial but also to understand its drawbacks.
‘Toxicity’, which is one of the major health concerns, is whether due to environmental stresses or due to unknowingly exposure to some toxic substances, needs to be re-looked in depth.
The conference provided an opportunity for researchers across the globe to understand and showcase their data related to ‘Toxicity’. Immunology and computational and systems biology are other major areas which are evolving and need to be integrated with modern cell biology as a whole to understand and predict the things much better.
Prof Jagat Roy, professor at Department of Zoology, BHU, Varanasi and president of Indian Society of Cell Biology; Prof Raghurama G, director of BITS Pilani Goa Campus; Prof Angshuman Sarkar, faculty at department of Biological Sciences of BITS Pilani Goa Campus and convenor of the conference; and Prof Vijayashree Nayak, Acting head of the department of Biological Sciences of BITS Pilani Goa Campus
addressed the audience.
Renowned scientists from across the country including Prof S C Lakhotia (BHU, Varanasi), Dr Samit Chattopadhyay (director, IICB, Kolkata), Dr Kishore Paknikar (director, ARI, Pune), Dr Debashis Mitra (director, CDFD, Hyderabad), Dr Gopal Kundu (director, NCCS, Pune), Dr Saumitra Das (director, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, WB), Dr J K Pal (director, D Y Patil Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Institute, Pune) attended and delivered lectures in the conference which was attended by 300 scientists and researchers from across |
the country.
Around 50 lectures were delivered by prominent scientists of different biological sciences field and 200 posters based on latest research were presented across
the three days.
