IIT-Guwahati's 'SeriPort' to Provide Easy Access to Silk-Related Web Resources

Indian Researchers designed a built-in search engine that will serve as a portal on sericulture and will help them to mine accurate data quickly and will also conserve native knowledge related to the subject. The search engine has been designed to smoothly access web resources related to the field.

The SeriPort portal was developed at the Bioengineering Research Laboratory of Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati. The portal can be described as the database of databases. It has information collected from databases that contain seribiodiversity information like information on silkworms, pests, host plants, pathogens, etc.

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The portal was launched in May. As per Utpal Bora, Corresponding Author, Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, near to 70 databases have been added to the portal. Among them are 24 combined databases, 23 host plant databases, 22 silkworm databases, one pest and one pathogen database.

So far there have been 3,800 hits on the database and information is collected from different geographies including top silk-producer China and Japan, the leader in sericulture research.

Deepika Singh, Review Co-author and a research scholar at the laboratory said that while working on the project they realized that work related to the field was difficult to find and hence they decided to come up with this portal of databases. In order to maintain dynamic information, emerging data sets can also be added to the ones that are already there and hence solves the problem of invisibility of data related to this subject.

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With this, the websites having individual databases don’t have to perform search engine optimization (SEO) as all the information is provided at one source.

Along with all the information mentioned above, the portal also provides North East India's special links in regards to silk farming and effort they put in it.

Since India is the second largest silk producer after China, sericulture practices are of high importance when we talk about North East Indian traditional crafts like silkworm rearing, silk weaving, etc.