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Karthikeyan Thiyagarajan completed his Ph.D. in Agrobiodiversity in 2009 at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa (Italy) in collaboration with ENEA (Rome, Italy). From 2012 to May 2014 he was a Post-Doctoral International fellow at ENEA .

During his PhD, Karthikeyan studied the DREB-related DRF1 gene in Aegilops speltoides (isolation, characterization, diversity and identification of a transposable element). Subsequently, his research was principally focused on computational analyses of orthologous DRF1 gene and its transposable elements in Triticeae spp and, secondary, on SNPs studies in Phenylalanine ammonia lyase gene of Fagopyrum spp.

During his post-doc research, Karthikeyan have utilized IWGSC Blast tools and databank facilities to analyse and compare his DRF1 gene and the available chromosome contigs of bread wheat. He found interesting alignment/similarity features of whole gene and its UTR region, especially concerning the promoter region. For this reason, Dr. Patrizia Galeffi recommended Karthikeyan for the IWGSC Early Career Award at PAG Asia 2014.

Karthikeyan presented his research and results at the IWGSC workshop at PAG Asia 2014. “I would like to say that IWGSC databank and tools are extensively useful for my previous and further research in genetics/genomics aspects of wheat and its wild relatives.”

Recently, Karthikeyan applied to a call of the Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship supported by Bioversity International, to be carried out at CIMMYT (Nepal and Mexico centres) and has been positively evaluated and funded. In December 2014, he will start working on “genotyping of salinity tolerant bread wheat varieties using TaHKT1;5-D, a cosegregating gene of Nax2 locus”.