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Biography
Dr. Rakesh Srivastava (ICRISAT) leads the global chickpea molecular breeding and pearl millet genomics and molecular breeding teams at ICRISAT. He is extensively involved in generation of various genetic and genomic resources, mining, mapping and deployment of QTLs/genes for various biotic, abiotic, grain and fodder quality related traits in pearl millet. He is involved in development and maintenance of a world pearl millet inbred germplasm association panel (PMiGAP), representing the global pearl millet genetic diversity. He has contributed significantly towards the international whole genome sequencing initiative for pearl millet involving the world reference germplasm Tift23D2B1-PI-P5, and the entire PMiGAP. He helped in development of Chromosome Segment Substitution Lines (CSSLs) in an agronomically elite genetic background for all the seven linkage groups. He is involved in development and maintenance of more than 20 pairs of bi-parental mapping population segregating for various traits of agronomic importance. He helped developed a consensus linkage map in pearl millet using four diverse sets of mapping populations. The consensus map constructed till date has the largest number of SSRs of any map published till now for this crop, and is a reference genetic map globally. He is associated in deployment of major effect validated QTLs for important traits in parental lines of popular hybrids in collaboration with the National Agricultural Research System (NARS). He is also actively involved in various capacity building programs, and supervised/supervising six Ph.D. and nine Master’s students for thesis research work.