Zabardast Buriev

Zabardast Buriev was born in Tashkent in 1975. He is a scientist in cotton genomics and biotechnology. He received the degree of Candidate of Biological Sciences in 2005 and later became a Doctor of Biological Sciences and professor.

Since 2003 he has been a responsible investigator in international and local cotton genomics projects. In 2005–2006 he trained at a research centre of the US Department of Agriculture in Mississippi. One of his early notable studies mapped DNA loci linked to cotton fibre development with microsatellite markers; he later led Uzbek–US cooperation projects that assessed the resistance of cotton germplasm to root-knot nematode and Fusarium wilt.

In 2009–2012 he headed an Academy of Sciences project to produce transgenic cotton lines based on synthetic RNAi duplexes. According to the centre, he took part in creating four early-maturing cotton varieties of the Porlok series, co-authored the varieties Ravnaq-1 and Ravnaq-2 bred by marker-assisted selection, and holds four patents on small interfering RNA (siRNA).

Since April 2012 he was deputy director for science at the Center of Genomics and Bioinformatics of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan; in 2021, when the centre announced work on an edible plant-based COVID-19 vaccine, the press named him in that post. By 2023 he led the centre as its director, and he works with bachelor's and master's students and oversees the young scientists' seminar and training courses.

In October 2024 a delegation headed by Buriev signed a cooperation memorandum in Beijing with the China National Center for Bioinformation at the Beijing Institute of Genomics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has published dozens of papers in international journals and has attended major conferences in the USA, India and Austria.