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Feature

What do we have at UODA

Md. Aynal Haque Rana

Hi, everyone, welcome for the first time to our University of Development Alternative (UODA) in Star Campus of The Daily Star. The University of Development Alternative, a new one but rooted in old values, is committed to making itself a leading center of academic excellence in the country. Within a sort time the University Of Development Alternative (UODA) has developed its own culture, vibrant with liveliness, creativity and dynamism. Now it's a home of many teachers, researchers, and motivated students. Although we haven't a gorgeous building as other private universities have but we have our own simple campus at Dhanmondi. But we have some extraordinary subjects to study. One is Bio-technology& Genetic Engineering and another is new but special one - Molecular Medicine & Bio-informatics.

As a country we are living with various problems. Modern and affordable health care is almost absent in our rural areas and inaccessible to the low and middle-income groups in the urban areas. Life science can play an important role in the betterment of life. Bio-technology & Genetic Engineering (BGE) and Molecular Medicine & Bio-informatics (MMB) represent the latest advancements in life science and have become the subjects of choice in most of the developed countries.

Bio-technology at UODA: This century has been coined as the "Century of Bio-technology". BGE can contribute extensively to increased food, reducing environmental pollution, and reduction of poverty in all its multi-dimensional aspects. Genetic engineering not only opens up new avenues in boosting agricultural outputs and environmental pollution, it can play a major role in the production of vaccines, drugs and gene therapy. At UODA the department of BGE emphasizes advanced studies in pharmaceutical, environmental, marine, animal, microbial, food and plant biotechnology. Students shall be given training in molecular biological techniques, which would enable them to be familiar with tissue culture, cloning, generation of transgenic plants and recombinant gene therapy.

The department of BGE has an ongoing program at both the bachelor's degree and master's degree level. As part of the master's degree requirements, students are expected to submit a dissertation based on original research and publication in international peer-reviewed journals. Molecular Medicine & Bio- informatics in UODA: The department of molecular Medicine & Bio-informatics is the first of its kind as a discipline in Bangladesh. The aim of the department is to train a new generation of pharmacists, drug discoveries and seek cause-effect relationships between diseases and polymorphisms. The department emphasizes a thorough understanding of disease processes and drugs along with data management, algorithm development and data mining. In a broader sense Bio-informatics not only covers genomics and proteomics, but also deals with how a researcher can transform genetic data to protein structure and functions. Bio-informatics consists of the latest advances of computer applications in medical and biological sciences. It has become one of the most valuable subjects in the developed world and a number of rapidly developing countries. But we have a lacking of a well-furnished laboratory for this kind of subject, may be it will be solved in near future. May be Bangladesh will gain the Nobel Prize in medicine one day.

Md. Aynal Haque Rana is a
student of UODA