Leading players gather at the draw for the World Table Tennis Championships ©ITTF/Facebook

Top seed and defending champion Ma Long could meet doubles partner and home hope Timo Boll in the quarter-finals of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) World Championships starting at the Messe Arena in Düsseldorf tomorrow. 

An official draw was conducted for both singles competitions in the German city today.

Boll, the evergreen 36-year-old who shared bronze with Ma at the 2011 World Championships in Rotterdam, will be seeking a return to his best form in front of a home crowd after being plagued by injuries in recent seasons.

Ma will be aiming to emulate team-mate and 2011 and 2013 world champion Zhang Jike in securing two successive world titles.

Both will start against qualifiers.

Third seed Xin Xu of China will face a potential quarter-final with fellow left-hander and Olympic singles bronze medallist Jun Mizutani of Japan in the second section of the draw.

Mizutani, widely considered the best non-Chinese player in the world at the moment, beat Xu in a thrilling duel in the Olympic team final in Rio de Janeiro last year.

Rising Chinese star and 2014 Summer Youth Olympic champion Fan Zhendong of China is seeded second and could meet Germany's London 2012 Olympic bronze medallist Dimitrij Ovtcharov in the last eight.

Zhang is drawn in the third section of the draw and faces a potential quarter-final match-up with Wong Chun Ting of Hong Kong.

Miu Hirano will seek to continue her brilliant form in the women's singles ©Getty Images
Miu Hirano will seek to continue her brilliant form in the women's singles ©Getty Images

The biennial individual World Championships is set to be broadcast in over 120 territories around the world.

Only qualifying matches will take place tomorrow, with the seeds not expected to enter proceedings until Wednesday (May 31).

On the women's side, Olympic and defending champion Ding Ning of China starts as top seed as she chases a third world title after successes in 2011 and 2015.

Kisumi Ishikawa of Japan could lie in wait in the quarter-finals.

But the best hope of a non-Chinese victor comes in the form of Ishikawa's team-mate Miu Hirano, who beat Ding en-route to a shock gold at the Asian Championships in Wuxi.

Hirano could meet Ding in the semi-finals.

Other Chinese players will look to dominate the bottom half of the draw.

Zhu Yuling and Chen Meng could meet in the quarter-final in the third section, while second seed Liu Shiwen is expected to face Cheng I-ching of Taiwan in the bottom part.