Huihui Li
Huihui Li is a Senior Scientist – Quantitative Geneticist at CIMMYT in China.
Tag: bioinformatics
Akshaya Biswal
Akshaya Biswal is a scientist specialized in plant transformation and tissue culture, working with CIMMYT’s Genetic Resources Program. His current work focuses on application of gene editing to improve host-plant resistance.
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)/Cas9-mediated genome editing has revolutionized our ability to study gene function and alter it to improve biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, increase yield potential of crop plants or even to improve the quality of grains. Various plant diseases cause up to 30% yield loss in cereals. Polyploidy in maize and wheat poses additional difficulty to breeders for developing and deploying resistant lines to pathogens. Some these can be solved by biotechnological intervention with relative ease. Biswal’s team uses gene editing to: control Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) in Africa for improved grain harvests; improve stem rust and powdery mildew resistance in wheat; and discover and validate the function of candidate genes underpinning large effect QTLs.
Prior to joining CIMMYT, Biswal completed postdoctoral placements at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the University of North Carolina. He earned a PhD in Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Technological University, an MSc from Banaras Hindu University, and a BSc from Utkal University, India.
Claudio César Ayala Hernández
Claudio Ayala is an experienced Data Management Coordinator with a demonstrated history of working in the research industry. He has a Master’s degree focused on Information Systems and Applied Computing and is skilled in analytics, database management, and the development of tools for effectively capturing, curating, storing and integrating different datasets.
Carolina Paola Sansaloni
Carolina Sansaloni is a molecular geneticist and leader of the Genetic Analysis Service for Agriculture, a high throughput genotyping platform managed by CIMMYT’s Seeds of Discovery initiative that uses Diversity Arrays Technology. She regularly contributes to projects that have strategic significance in wheat pathology, disease resistance, quality, functional genomics and bioinformatics.
Sansaloni also works on the wheat Global Diversity Analysis, which characterizes and analyses seeds in genebanks at CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). Her team has characterized around 100,000 wheat accessions, including more than 40 species that represent 40 percent of the CIMMYT genebank and almost 100 percent of the ICARDA ‘s genebank wheat collection. This is an incredible and unique resource for wheat scientists that provides a genetic framework to help select the most relevant accessions for breeding.
Juan Burgueño
Juan Burgueño is a senior scientist and head of CIMMYT’s biometrics and statistics unit. He and his team are committed to developing new mathematical and statistical methodologies, and applying them to solve the problems CIMMYT and partner researchers face.
Burgueño and his team mainly focus on research, consultancy and training on a broad range of topics like experimental design, multi-environment cultivar trials, agronomy, pathology and entomology experiments, genetic resources conservation, mapping quantitative trait loci, genome selection and genetic diversity.
As head of the unit, he coordinates the team’s efforts in these areas and strengthens CIMMYT’s team of biometricians in order to effectively collaborate and help CIMMYT’s staff and partners. Burgueño mainly contributes to experimental design, statistical modeling, genome selection and analysis of high-throughput phenotyping data.