Sanjeev Kumar Sharma is a member of the Potato Genetics and Breeding group at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee. He earned his Bachelor’s in Forestry and Master’s in Biotechnology, with a minor in Forestry, from CCS Haryana Agricultural University, India; and pursued his PhD at the University of Dundee, UK under a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship award.
Sanjeev has over 25 years’ experience in potato basic and applied research covering a wide spectrum of expertise from novel methods of propagation and seed production, through to genetics, genomics, marker development, molecular biology, transgenics, next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics. He has developed a prototype for advanced and accelerated propagation system in potato using somatic embryo-derived synthetic seeds. Sanjeev was the member of the international potato genome sequencing project where he co-planned and co-coordinated the genetic anchoring part which led to the construction of the first reference potato chromosome-scale pseudomolecules. He also chaired and coordinated the project monitoring meetings of the international potato genome sequencing consortium. He has collaborated on several national and international projects related to potato including Innovate UK project on potato breeding and genomics, BBSRC-HAPI project on tuber dormancy, EU H2020 G2PSOL and ADAPT projects as well as various other academic and industrially funded projects.
He is utilizing and developing novel genetic and sequence-based genotyping approaches for trait analyses and allele mining in potato targeting important agronomic and processing as well as disease resistance traits covering approaches such as linkage mapping, genome-wide association studies, sequence-based bulk-segregant analysis, genomic selection, genotyping-by-sequencing, whole-exome capture sequencing and single-primer enrichment technology. Overall, here his broader focus of research is to exploit genetic, genomic, and biotechnological approaches for furthering potato research and accelerate breeding efficiencies in potato.
He has served as member of the Scientific Program Committee for the 18th International Solanaceae Genome Conference (SOL2023, Canada), Advisory Board Panel member for Plant Genomics Congress Europe (2015-2016), reviewer for British Council Newton Fund (2018-2022) grants and evaluator for KAPPA Programme grants 2020 TACR Czech Republic. He sits on the Editorial Board of the international journal Genes and has been invited to several international conferences as invited speaker and to deliver platform talks. He also co-organised India-Scotland Research Symposium at Hutton.
Before relocating to the UK, he acquired considerable experience in commercial plant tissue culture notably managing technical operations in a large micropropagation facility (Sheel Biotech Ltd, India - established in collaboration with Cultiss, Holland B.V.) with an annual capacity of >5 million plants. He also established an R&D-cum-pilot scale tissue culture laboratory at Thapar Centre for Industrial Research, Patiala, India along with developing indigenous protocols for large-scale production of potato microtubers and upscaled it for generating over 0.5 million microtubers and 1.2 million minitubers per annum. There, he also worked on the selection and micropropagation of elite Eucalyptus trees for the pulp and paper industry including establishment of a clonal demonstration plantation using tissue culture raised Eucalypt saplings.
Links:
[1] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8373-5509