Dr. Sudhakar Pandey has 21 years of experience in vegetable breeding particularly on cucurbit crops and is presently working as a principal scientist at ICAR-Indian Institute of Vegetable Research, Varanasi. He has made significant contributions on the improvement of cucurbitaceous vegetables and was instrumental in developing 17 varieties in different cucurbitaceous vegetable crops. He is working mostly on genetics and molecular breeding of cucumber, pumpkin, and ash gourd. Dr. Pandey identified and characterized a new gene SH1 (SHORT HYPOCOTYL 1) responsible for regulating hypocotyl elongation in cucumber. His work on new SSR markers and QTLs for powdery mildew resistance and parthenocarpy fruit set in cucumber is widely cited. As a co-nodal officer of DUS on cucurbits and member of Taskforce, he developed DUS Testing Guidelines for pumpkin, cucumber, bottle gourd, bitter gourd, muskmelon, watermelon, and pointed gourd. He published over 75 research papers as author and co-author and 03 books. He is the recipient of prestigious awards like, ICAR Outstanding Multidisciplinary Team Research Award, Dr. Kriti Singh Life Time Aachievement award, Distinguished Agriculture Scientist Award (Horticulture), Young Scientist Award and Scientist of the Year. He is a fellow of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, India, and Uttar Pradesh Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lucknow. Dr. Yiqun Weng is a research geneticist in the USDA-ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit, and Professor of the Horticulture Department, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin. He is a principal investigator for the USDA Cucumber Improvement Program focusing on cucumber germplasm enhancement. Research interests in his program include developing genetic and genomic resources for marker-assisted breeding, molecular mapping and cloning of horticulturally important genes and QTL, cucumber chromosome evolution and domestication, as well as efficient use of crop wild relatives for cucumber improvement. Since 2010, he has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in referred journals in these fields. He has also mentored/trained over 90 students, postdocs, and visiting scientists from nine countries.Prof. Tusar Kanti Behera has 23 years of experience in vegetable breeding and is presently working as a Director at Indian Institute of Vegetable Research Institute, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. He bred 20 varieties/hybrids in different vegetable crops and isolated gynoecious lines in bitter gourd from its feral form. He is working mostly on genetics and molecular breeding of bitter gourd and cucumber. He developed Indian gynoecious cucumber lines using MAS. Awarded with several prestigious awards including Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship,Hari Krishna Shastri Memorial Award, Best Teacher Award for Higher Education, Hooker Award. He is the Fellows of National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Indian Society of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Indian Academy of Horticultural Science, India. He served as FAO International Consultant in Vegetable Breeding at Libya 2010 and Visiting scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He published his research work in more than 50 research papers in international journals and edited three books. He has guided 16 postgraduate students for their thesis dissertations at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India.Dr. Kailiang Bo is a researcher of the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Meanwhile he is taking the position of the deputy director of the department of cucurbits genetics and breeding. He works on the cucurbits genetics and breeding (e.g., cucumber, pumpkin, squash) more than 10 years. Dr. Bo focuses on several research interests, including mapping and cloning of the cucumber important genes and QTL, development of molecular markers closely linked to the target traits, germplasm development and enhancement by using Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS). He mapped or cloned numbers of genes and QTL associated with plant architecture (short, long and extra-long hypocotyl, etc.) and fruit quality (orange and green flesh, light-green skin, ultra-high fruit spine density, fruit length and diameter, etc.). He developed closely linked and efficient molecular markers for these candidate genes and employed them for cucumber breeding by applying MAS. Especially, Dr. Bo created a molecular breeding approach for cucumber fruit quality traits improvement by the MAS. He developed more than 10 elite cucumber germplasm that can be used to improve cucumber varieties. In addition, Dr. Bo also conducts research on vegetable heterosis. Based on the previous study and his research, he discussed the contributions of yield-related traits and proposed a comprehensive yield heterosis breeding strategy using cabbage, cucumber, and tomato as examples. In the above research fields, he published over 30 papers in international journals and allied 8 Chinese patents.
