Nagendra Kumar Singh is an Indian agricultural scientist. He is a National Professor (Dr. B.P. Pal Chair) under ICAR at National Research Centre for Plant Biotechnology, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. He was born in a small village called Rajapur in the Mau District of Uttar Pradesh. He is known for his research in the area of plant genomics and biotechnology, particularly for his contribution in the decoding of rice, tomato and pigeonpea genomes and understanding of wheat seed storage proteins and their effect on wheat quality. He has also made significant advances in comparative analysis of rice and wheat genomes and mapping of genes for salt tolerance and basmati quality traits in rice.
Education and personal life
Singh was born on October 15, 1958. His father Late Shri Indrasan Singh was a village-level officer at a Block Development Office in Uttar Pradesh.
He received his early education at the Primary Pathshala in Tilasawa village 1964-68, Junior High School, Jahanaganj 1969-71; matriculation and senior secondary from Wesley Higher Secondary School, Azamgarh, 1971–75; He then did his B.Sc.(Ag.) 1978 and M.Sc. (Ag.) in Genetics and Plant Breeding in 1980 from Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He was awarded gold medals by BHU for achieving position in the university in both B.Sc. (Ag.) and M.Sc. (Ag.). Immediately after completion of his post graduation from BHU, he moved to Adelaide, Australia on a University of Adelaide Post Graduate Scholarship to pursue his Doctoral Degree which he eventually earned from Waite Agricultural Research Institute, University of Adelaide in 1985, his Ph.D. thesis topic was "Structure and Genetic control of endosperm proteins in wheat and rye".[1] There he was awarded Dr K.P. Barley Prize best post graduate student prize at the university in 1983. He was then awarded the prestigious CSIRO Post Doctoral Award in 1986 and the Queen Elizabeth II Award, by the Australian government in 1988 for his post doctoral research. Though offered a regular position as a research scientist at CSIRO, Sydney, he returned to India to serve the Agricultural Science establishment in India as he was strongly influenced by the Self Reliance (Swadeshi) ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. He works at the Indian Council for Agricultural Research with a motive to make India more self-reliant in area of food security and crop improvement and for the welfare of farmers by playing a leading role in applying the power of Genomics revolution.
Professional achievements
Singh has worked worldwide with researchers to improve various traits of crops like rice, wheat, pigeonpea and tomato. He has been a part of many national and international research projects in the area of plant biotechnology and genomics.
In 2011 Singh led a group of 31 scientists from all over India and sequenced the pigeon pea genome, it was first time that the genome of a legume was sequenced. The effort was a totally indigenous effort by scientists from ICAR, NRCPB, Banaras Hindu University, Indian Institute of Pulse Research, UAS Dharwad and PDKV Akola. The First Draft of pigeon pea genome sequence was published in J. Plant Biochem Biotechnol.[2]
His professional career began in 1981:
- 1981-1988. Research Associate, University of Adelaide: Research on proteins in wheat, discovered a novel class of proteins in wheat seed and named it "Triticin", Triticin is a legume-type storage protein present in the wheat seed in small quantity. It can be manipulated to increase the nutritional quality of wheat
- 1986-1991. Post Doctoral Research fellow, and Queen Elizabeth II National Research Fellow at CSIRO Wheat Research Unit, Sydney and Waite Agricultural Research Institute, Adelaide, respectively. In this period he worked on the Use of sonication and size- exclusion HPLC for separation of wheat gluten proteins
- 1991-1994. Scientist C, CFTRI, Mysore. Developed the Molecular Biology Unit at CFTRI
- 1994-2000. Associate Professor, GBPUAT, Pant Nagar'. worked in areas of transgenic, isogenic and tissue culture filed two patents, introduced Ph.D. programme in Biotechnology during this period
- 2000-2010. Principal scientist, NRCPB, IARI. Built the infrastructure for genomics research and was part of many national and international research projects on rice, tomato and pigeopea. Led the ICAR team of researchers of the International Rice Genome Sequencing project and led the research which got published in the reputed journal Nature. It was after many decades that any research work got published in the Nature Journal from Indian Agricultural Research Institute.
- 2010–present. National Professor, Dr B.P. Pal Chair, IARI, ICAR.
