Florence info forays into bioinformatics

Zia Askari

HYDERABAD: In a bid to enter into the IT enabled services, Hyderabad based

Florence Infotech is making its entry into the bioinformatics space by creating

a separate company christened as - Florence Informatics Pvt. Ltd. involving an

initial investment of Rs 1 crore.

The company is planning to open a research and development center at the

ICICI Park in Hyderabad, it will be operational within a month. "We are

going to open our R&D center at the ICICI park wherein we would develop

solutions for the bioinformatics industry as well as the WAP based technologies

including CDMA and bluetooth technologies," said, Florence Infotech

managing director, G M Krishna. The bioinformatics entity would focus itself in

providing solutions in the areas of protein modeling, protein structure dug

design, bioinformatics support for genome sequencing and screening of drug

databases.

According to Krishna drug research today depends a lot on computer aided

methods. Bioinformatics involves organizing an overload of different information

by creating a simple, logical framework for grouping, storing and retrieving

data. Bioinformatics could well be seen as a big tool of mathematical

algorithms, which describes the relationship between different types of

biological data. "The search for unknown sequences of large proteins, DNA,

genes, biomolecules, enzymes etc and their decoding, is one of the most

important areas of bioinformatics. As an application, bioinformatics could prove

to be helpful in developing a vaccine against some disease or virus," he

added.

The company is also going to develop an agricultural field for the

biotechnology foray. The new agri-bio tech division would be a part of the

bioinformatics arm of the company. "We are looking forward to tying

ourselves up with some of the leading companies in the WAP arena in the country

to develop WAP solutions and services," he added. The company is already

under negotiations with Nokia for the Bluetooth initiative.