Pawan Kumar Singh is a senior scientist who heads CIMMYT’s wheat pathology group, where he researches wheat diseases with emphasis on Fusarium head blight, Septoria tritici blotch, tan spot, spot blotch, Stagonospora nodorum blotch and wheat blast.
As part of his work, Singh collects, isolates and characterizes different fungal isolates from naturally infected wheat spikes or leaves, and those with high aggressiveness are used in disease screening nurseries. He then characterizes wheat germplasm for reaction to different diseases, then selects promising lines with resistance and good agronomical traits to be compiled in international disease resistance nurseries. He also conducts genetic studies using bi-parental populations or association mapping panel to decipher underlying resistance factors, and identify linked molecular markers that could be used in marker-assisted selection.
