Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Pathogens like HIV-1, which evolve into many closely related variants displaying differential infectivity and evolutionary dynamics in a short time scale, require fast and accurate classification. Conventional whole genome sequence alignment-based methods are computationally expensive and involve complex analysis. Alignment-free methodologies are increasingly being used to effectively differentiate genomic variations between viral species. Multifractal analysis, which explores the self-similar nature of genomes, is an alignment-free methodology that has been applied to study such variations. However, whether multifractal analysis can quantify variations between closely related genomes, such as the HIV-1 subtypes, is an open question. Here we address the above by implementing the multifractal analysis on four retroviral genomes (HIV-1, HIV-2, SIVcpz, and HTLV-1), and demonstrate that individual multifractal properties can differentiate between different retrovirus types easily. However, the individual multifractal measures do not resolve within-group variations for different known subtypes of HIV-1 M group. We show here that these known subtypes can instead be classified correctly using a combination of the crucial multifractal measures. This method is simple and computationally fast in comparison to the conventional alignment-based methods for whole genome phylogenetic analysis. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.