Phytoplasma Diseases of Major Crops, Trees, and Weeds

Ajay Kumar Tiwari, PhD is a Scienti?c Of?cer and currently serving as Officer-In-Charge at Sugarcane Research and Seed Multiplication Center, Gola, Khiri, UP, India. He completed his Ph.D. on cucurbit viruses at the CCS University, Meerut, UP, India, in 2011. He is a member of the British Society of Plant Pathology, Indian Phytopathological Society, Sugarcane Technologists Association of India, International Society of Sugarcane Technologists, Society of Sugarcane Research and Promotion, Prof H. S. Srivastava Foundation, and Plant Research and Educational Promotion Society. He has published 100 research articles in reputed national and international journals. He has also authored eight books published by Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Nova. He has submitted more than 300 plant pathogen nucleotide sequences to GenBank. Dr. Tiwari is a regular reviewer and member of the editorial boards of several international journals and is managing editor of Sugar Tech published by Springer (IF1.591) and Chief editor of the Agrica journal. He received the CIPAM Young Researcher Award in 2011 and the DST-SERB Young Scientist Award. He was received the Young Scientist Award by the Chief Minister of the State Government of UP for his outstanding contributions in the area of plant pathology and was the recipient of many international travel awards conferred by DST, DBT, and CSIR in India; PATHOLUX-Luxembourg; and IOM-Brazil. He has attended conferences and workshops in China, Italy, Germany, Vietnam, and Thailand and has delivered invited talks in India and abroad. He is currently involved in research on the molecular characterization and management of agricultural plant pathogens and the production of healthy sugarcane seed materials and their distributions in UP through cane societies.

Kadriye Çaglayan is full time professor in Plant Pathology Department of Hatay Mustafa Kemal University in Hatay-Turkey. She has published over 180 research publications and 5 book chapters on plant viruses, phytoplasmas and viroids. She was invited speaker at many national and international meetings and seminars, conveners of many international meetings organized by ISHS, member of scientific committees of several international meetings on plant virology, referee for numerous scientific international journals. She visited many important virology lab worldwide and collaborated with many important scientists. She and her team was involved in many international projects supported by EU, NATO and also Turkish Scientific Council (TUBITAK) in frame of several bilateral projects with different European countries. She is member of the Turkish Phytopathology Society and International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) . She is responsible of the Virology laboratory where she is leading a team of about 20 collaborators/students focusing on the diagnosis, epidemiology and control of plant diseases caused by viruses, viroids and phytoplasmas, applying biological approaches and molecular tools. At the moment she is head of Plant Protection Department in her university and also has been member of international projects evaluation advisory board member of TUBITAK in the last 2 years.

Plant Protection Research Institute (PPRI) Assoc. Prof. Dr. Trinh Xuan Hoat has completed M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at Kobe University, Japan. His current position is Deputy Director General of Plant Protection Research Institute (PPRI), Vietnam Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VAAS). His team has studied on sugarcane grassy shoot, sugarcane white leaf, cassava witches broom diseases, and longan witches broom syndrome. His team is focusing on detection, identification of phytoplasma diseases, and their management in Vietnam and has published many papers related to phytoplasma diseases on different crops such as sugarcane, cassava, rice, maize, sesame.

Ali M. Al-Subhi is currently serving as Plant Pathogens Researcher at the Department of Plant Sciences,College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. He earned his MSc and PhDin plant protection from the Sultan Qaboos University, Oman in 2006 and 2018 respectively. His research work focused on phytoplasma disease and genetic diversity. His experience and researches in phytoplasma disease is highly regarded by his peers and he has published widely on phytoplasma genetic diversity and genes interaction.He has a collaboration with national and international researchers from different organizations around the world. He has been involved in more than 18 research projects as a main-investigator and co-investigator. His involvement in research has resulted in authorship or co-authorship of 44 refereed scientific papers and 23 posters and proceedings. He also, attended 19 local and international conferences and workshops and gave 25 presentations.He is a reviewer for many international refereed journals.He has taught undergraduate courses and has also guided MSc and PhD students on different aspects of plant pathology and genetic diversity.He has visited over 10 countries as research visitor, research training, panel discussion and also for attending workshop and conferences.

She has received her PhD in Plant Pathology from the University of Putra Malaysia, where she studied the detection of unknown diseases in palms and developed protocols to detect, identify and quantify phytoplasmas in plant materials. She studied the genetic mechanisms involved in phytoplasma tolerance in coconut palm through transcriptome analysis over her research fellow at the University of Putra Malaysia. She led several research projects on phytoplasma diseases with the purpose to establish/ or improve strategies for prevention, timely decision making and effective management of the diseases with economic importance. She has published several research articles on the subject as peer reviewed papers in leading international journals. As an outcome of her research findings, the entire phytoplasma research community benefits from the discovery of the new taxa. She has been invited speaker at several national and international conferences and reviewer of numerous refereed journals. She has internationally collaborated with several prominent scientists in the field of phytoplasma research.