Dr. Kulvinder Gill received his bachelor’s in agronomy with honors and a master’s in plant breeding degrees from Punjab Agricultural University, India (1983). From 1983 to 1985, he worked as a research assistant at the same university working on the genetics of slow rusting mechanism in wheat. He received his Ph.D. from Kansas State University in genetics (1986-1990). Dr. Gill continued to work at Kansas State first as a research associate from 1991 to 1993 and then as a senior scientist from 1994 to 1996. He joined University of Nebraska as an assistant professor in molecular cytogenetics in 1996 and became associate professor in 2001. Dr. Gill joined Washington State University in August 2002 as the Orville A. Vogel Endowed Chair in Wheat Breeding and Genetics.

Crop and Soil Sciences
Kulvinder Gill
Understanding and Manipulating the Wheat Genome

The research goal of Kulvinder Gill and his collaborators is to understand the wheat genome and manipulate it for crop improvement using modern techniques and tools. Current research projects are to:

• localize and demarcate gene-containing regions of crop plants;
• establish an efficient approach to access agronomically important genes;
• study mechanism of wheat defense response to biotic stress;
• understand the extent and distribution of recombination;
• study molecular basis of chromosome pairing control in polyploid
  species.

Significant recent outcomes:

1. provided unequivocal evidence that most wheat genes are present in physically small regions encompassing less than 10 percent of the genome;
2. the gene-rich regions are further partitioned into gene-rich and gene-poor compartments with the former being only about 10-20 percent of the gene-rich regions;
3. recombination occurs only in the gene containing regions but the extent of recombination vary as much as 50-fold among the gene-rich regions;
4. for the first time sorted wheat chromosome arms to more than 95 percent purity using ditelo lines and flow sorting;
5. have generated a complete contig of chromosomal region containing the Ph1 gene and have identified three candidates for the gene;
6. developed a high density physical and genetic linkage map of the wheat genome;
7. cloned and characterized 178 unique expressed genes that structurally resemble the cloned resistant genes.

Contact Information
Kulvinder S. Gill, Ph.D.
Vogel Endowed Chair for Wheat Breeding and Genetics
Department of Crop and Soil Sciences

Washington State University
PO Box 646420
Pullman, WA 99164-6420

Telephone: 509-335-4666
Fax: 509-335-8674
E-mail: ksgill@wsu.edu