While the cultural part of ‘Germany and India: Infinite Opportunities,' the 15-month-long collaborative celebration marking the 60 years of the Indo-German diplomatic relations, kicked off here on Friday with the percussion duet by India's Sivamani and Germany's Christoph Haberer, cooperation in basic sciences reached another milestone with the inauguration of the second Indo-German Max-Planck Centre in India.
The Max Planck-NCBS Centre for Research on Lipids will be located at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bangalore.
The centre is a collaborative venture of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the Max-Planck Society and an outcome of the long-standing fruitful collaborative research between the scientists of the NCBS and the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Dresden.
German Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office Cornelia Pieper did a symbolic inauguration of the centre in the presence of M.K. Bhan, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology; K. VijayRaghavan, Director, NCBS; Mario Zerial, Director, MPI-CBG; and scientists and other officials of the two countries.
At a meeting held in Bangalore on September 22, a formal Memorandum of Understanding, setting out the details of the functioning of the centre, was signed.
The Indo-German Max-Planck Centre for Computer Sciences (IMPECS) was established by the Department of Science and technology (DST) and the Max-Planck Society at the IIT-Delhi in February 2010. It was a product of collaborative research between the IIT-Delhi and the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF), Saarbrucken.
These centres are set up with equal contributions (in value) from both sides, and the new Bangalore centre will involve a total expenditure of about €20 million a year. In terms of cash flow, India will spend about €2 million a year and Germany about €10 million.
The rest of Indian contribution will be in terms of infrastructure and other expenses towards running the centre.
Lipids are a broad group of molecules occurring in all living organisms, and about 20,000 per organism have so far been identified.
They include fats, waxes, fat-soluble vitamins and fatty acids and their derivatives, including mono-, di-, and tri-glycerides. Lipids constitute one of the main structural components of cell membranes.
They also act as important signalling molecules and have a significant role in energy storage. However, the detailed mechanisms of their synthesis and biological functions are still largely unexplored, pointed out Teymuras Kurzchalia of MPI-CBG, an expert in cell biology.
As he explained, with the genome sequences of various organisms now available, we know the general design and architecture of the cell structure, but different aspects of the “brick and mortar” that make up the cell are still largely unknown. “This is the crucial missing link in the realisation of the promise that genomics gave us about a decade ago of understanding the linkage between genes and the functional molecules,” said Dr. Zerial. “Pharmacologically, it is important to understand this gene to lipid linkage. Lipidomics could develop very soon into a key tool in cell and developmental biology, molecular medicine and nutritional science,” he added.
One of the important objectives of lipid research today is to carry out an inventory of lipids in nematodes and model organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans and drosophila to understand the basic principles of how different lipids are synthesised and how they are involved in the organisation and functioning of cell membranes and signalling processes in higher organisms, including humans.
According to an NCBS release, during the Centre's start-up phase, which will extend over five years, a research group will be set up in Dresden and Berlin. Its researchers will be involved in the biochemical and biophysical analysis of biological membranes and the genetic analysis of lipid metabolic processes in various animal model systems. The special expertise the NCBS will bring to this collaboration is new imaging techniques that Satyajit Mayor and his group have developed to observe processes at nanoscale within the cell, according to Dr. VijayRaghavan.
From the DBT's perspective, the centre for research on lipids will become part of the fast-developing Bangalore Bio-Cluster for research and development in biology along with the already established Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms.
All the institutes established thus far are under the NCBS umbrella, and the Bio-Cluster itself has been created after a Memorandum of Understanding between the DBT and the Department of Atomic Energy, the NCBS's apex administrative department.
