Dr. Anilkumar Chandrappa is a scientist at the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, who is focused on genetic gains in rice breeding. He graduated from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru. While pursuing his Ph.D., Dr. Chandrappa studied classical genetic studies in chilli, which earned him a university gold medal for outstanding research in 2019. He was a recipient of a national fellowship to support his Ph.D. from the University Grants Commission (UGC), Government of India. His research interests include incorporating novel breeding approaches into traditional breeding methods in order to increase genetic gain in a limited amount of time. He is also interested in understanding the basis of complex traits with quantitative genetic approaches. Currently, he is working on genomics assisted rice breeding for stress resilience and grain traits, which includes utilization of genomic predictions and haplotype-based breeding along with classical breeding approaches.
Dr. Chandrappa’s research during his Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship is aimed at investigating the impact of targeted recombinations over random recombinations in maximizing genetic gain in crop improvement. In this project, he is tackling significant corollary queries, including: firstly, how targeted recombinations are superior to modulated recombination frequencies across the genome in maximizing genetic gain; and secondly, how the varied number of chromosomes with targeted recombination impact the genetic gain against altered recombination frequencies across the entire genome.