The Dept. of Biochemistry was started in 1974 by Prof. B. B. Biswas. Since the inception there have been significant contributions in the fields of control of transcription in plant systems, metabolism of inositol phosphates, biochemistry of leaf movement in Mimosa, bacterial sugar transport, seed storage proteins, developmental regulation in bacteriophages lambda and L1, chromosome transmission in the budding yeast, molecular genetics of Entamoeba histolytica, lysis-lysogeny switch in bacteriophage lambda, transcription regulation in Escherichia coli etc. 

Some of the topics of interest at present are: tubulin substructures and its interaction with drugs, protein folding, analysis of protein structures to understand conformation, weak interactions and molecular recognition, structural aspects of ubiquitination, protein degradation machinery of the parasitic protist Giardia lamblia, stress response in thermoacidophilic crenarchaea Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, studies on the proteins involved in the pathogenesis and gene regulation of Staphylococcus aureus, understanding anti-cancer properties of Indian plant extracts, structural characterization of dietary lectins, structural proteomics of Vibrio cholerae, nanobiotechnology, etc. 

Many faculty members of the department have earned laurels for the institute such as fellowships in national science academies. Prof. B. B. Biswas (1972) and Prof. B. Bhattacharyya (1988) have received the Bhatnagar Prize. Profs. B. Bhattacharyya and P. Chakrabarti are fellows of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Four students of the department, Suranjana Guha (1998), Debnath Pal (2000), Ranjit Bahadur (2010) and Mainak Guha Roy (2011) received the INSA Medal for Young Scientists.