The Centre for Bioinformatics was established by the University of Kerala in January 2005 to take up teaching, research and extension activities in bioinformatics and computational biology. This inter-disciplinary centre focuses of the computational applications in biology, drawing knowledge from mathematics, statistics, computer science, information technology, biology and bio-technology. The centre has currently a post-graduate programme (MSc. in Computational Biology) and a post-masters programme (MPhil. in Bioinformatics) in addition to research programmes leading to PhD. in Bioinformatics / Computational Biology. A distance education programme jointly with IGNOU is soon to be launched.

The Centre has attracted funding from various state and national agencies such as Kerala State IT Mission, Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of India, Dept. of Bio-Technology, Govt. of India, University Grants Commission, Dept. of Science, Technology and Environment, Govt. of Kerala.

Workshops and talks are organized regularly by the centre. Workshops/Seminars on Bioinformatics, Molecular Visualisation Softwares, Microarray Image Processing, Computer Modeling of Biological Pathways, Computer-Aided Drug Design, Scilab for Life Scientists, HMM for Bioinformaticians are some of the themes in the recent past. Bioinformatica India 08 (January 17-18, 2008) is a prestigious event organized by the Centre.

One of the major successes of the centre has been industrial incubation of a bioinformatics company, launched by the alumnus of the centre. The company SooryaKiran Bioinformatics Pvt Ltd., has in a short span of time secured work from American and Japanese clients in the area of sequence analysis and synthetic biology and had registered good growth by the end of second year of its operations.

The Centre has  over a  dozen  full-time research scholars which is its  major strength. A  modest  number  of publications has started  to emerge  including journals  such as  BMC Bioinformatics, In-Silico Biology- International Journal of Computational Molecular Biology, Journal of Computer Society of India, Springer Computer & Information Science Server, Bioinformation, IEEE Potential etc.