Context: Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has launched MANAV : Human Atlas Initiative, towards improving knowledge on human physiology.

What is MANAV : Human Atlas Initiative?

• It is a project funded by DBT.
• aims at creating a database network of all tissues in the human body from the available scientific literature.
• It is a project that involves scientific skill development for annotation, science outreach along with handling big data.
• The programme will involve gaining better biological insights through physiological and molecular mapping, develop disease models through predictive computing and have a wholistic analysis and finally drug discovery.

Who can participate in this project?

• The project can be signed up by students who are in their final year graduation and above. Students from the fields of biochemistry, biotechnology, microbiology, botany, zoology, bioinformatics, health sciences, systems biologists, pharmacologists and data sciences can associate with this project.
• Even participants having a science background but not necessarily involved in active scientific research can be part of this network.

Why is MANAV important?

• So far, researchers and students have had little or no expertise in reading scientific literature and develop or build further information on the same. This platform will impart key skills to the student community to read classified scientific literature, in this case, on individual tissue-basis, and perform annotation and curation.
• Since all the information generated will pass through multiple levels of reviews, it will be an Atlas or a reliable collection on human body tissues. This collated data can be useful for both future researchers and parallelly, to the clinicians and drug developers, who finally handle human bodies in disease conditions.

What are the applications of information generated through MANAV?

The aim of the project remains to understand and capture the human physiology in two stages – in a normal stage and while in a disease stage. Such a database on individual tissues, once ready, can come handy in tracing the causes of a disease, understanding specific pathways and ultimately decode the body’s disease stage linked to tissues and cells. The teams will also study any potent elements or molecules that have never been used in the form of drugs, to target the specific cells or tissues.