The Department of Bioinformatics in Pondicherry University was started as Sub Distributed Information Centre of the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India (DBT) in 1991. The mandate of the department is to train manpower and conduct research in various areas of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Recognizing the progress made by the Centre, DBT upgraded the Centre to a full Centre level in 2002 and several new positions were sanctioned and additional funding was allocated. The Centre was elevated to Department in the year 2021.

The Department was identified as a Centre of Excellence for Research and Training in the field of Bioinformatics by the Department of Information Technology, Govt. of India, New Delhi from 2007 to 2013 and awarded a special grant of ` 3.69 crores. The Department has taken up several research projects and has offered modular courses in Bioinformatics under this Grant.

The Department started a M.Sc., program in Bioinformatics in 2007 supported by the University Grants Commission (UGC) under the scheme of “Innovative Programme – Teaching & Research in Interdisciplinary and Emerging Areas”. For advanced research in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, the Department started Ph.D. Programme in 2009. The Department also received UGC Special Assistance Program (SAP) at the DRS-I level in 2012 and was a part of DBT – BUILDER Program in 2010.The Department of Bioinformatics has received a grant of 1 crore under DST-FIST program for procuring sophisticated equipment in 2015.

The Department started an innovative M.Sc. program in Computational Biology fully funded by DBT in a network mode with Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai and Anna University, Chennai in 2010. This programme is first of its kind in the country and upgraded to M.Tech program in Computational Biology from 2014 in collaboration with Anna University, Chennai. The Department has also signed an MoU with Institute of Bioinformatics (IoB), Bangalore for collaborative research and Ph.D. guidance during the period 2013 to 2018. The Ph.D. students can visit these labs for collaborative research and the details are available at www.bicpu.edu.in.

All students, research scholars and faculty are provided round-the-clock computing facility. The Department has established a separate wet lab facility with sophisticated equipments. Most of the alumni have been placed in various leading research institutions and industries.

The Department has an excellent complement of teaching by the faculty who are involved in basic and applied research in different areas of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.  The Faculty have teaching/postdoctoral research experience in Indian and Foreign Universities/ Institutions.  Over the past few years, the Department has taken up research activities in the areas of genomics and proteomics, drug discovery and development, next generation sequencing, molecular evolution, systems biology, molecular modeling, structural biology, database development & Big data analytics etc., and several papers have been published in highly reputed International and National Journals. The faculty and students have received projects/fellowships from various funding agencies like Department of Biotechnology, Department of Information Technology, University Grants Commission, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-JRF/SRF, Department of Science and Technology, Bioinformatics National Certificate (BINC), DST-Innovation in Science pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and Rajiv Gandhi Fellowship.

University supported the Department with a separate state of art building of about 35000 sqfts with complete UPS power back up for all rooms.  The building is having 3 computer labs, 13 Faculty rooms, 13 individual research labs for faculty, common wet lab, common instrument room, Library, class rooms and a seminar hall.