Imran Siddiqi

Imran Siddiqi is Emeritus Scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, CSIR in Hyderabad. Dr. Imran Siddiqi’s areas of research interest are genetics, plant development and genetic recombination.

Dr. Siddiqi’s research centers around studying meiosis in plants using Arabidopsis as a model. His laboratory has identified and characterized genes that control key aspects of chromosome organization during meiosis: centromere configuration and cohesion, recombination, synapsis, and progression through the meiotic cell cycle. Information that has emerged from this work has provided leads with respect to molecular strategies for developing new methods of plant breeding that would lead to fixation of hybrid vigor in successive generations by a process called apomixis. Apomixis which occurs naturally in some plants, is the formation of asexual seeds bypassing meiotic chromosome reduction and fertilization of the egg cell so that the genotype of an apomictic embryo is identical to that of the parental plant. The possibility of harnessing apomixis for fixation of hybrid vigor and as a tool for plant breeding has important implications for agriculture.

Dr. Siddiqi completed his M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He was awarded his Ph.D. by the University of Oregon. Dr. Siddiqi's post doctoral work was carried out in Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Dr. Siddiqi was awarded the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2011.