Speed breeding: a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding
By Amy Watson, Sreya Ghosh, M. J. Williams, William S. Cuddy, J. Simmonds, M. Rey, M. A. M. Hatta, A. Hinchliffe, Andrew Steed, Daniel Reynolds and 24 more. bioRxiv, 2017
608 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The growing human population and a changing environment have raised significant concern for global food security, with the current improvement rate of several important crops inadequate to meet future demand [1]. This slow improvement rate is attributed partly to the long generation times of crop plants. Here we present a method called ‘speed breeding’, which greatly shortens generation time and accelerates breeding and research programs. Speed breeding can be used to achieve up to 6 generations per year for spring wheat (Triticum aestivum), durum wheat (T. durum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), and pea (Pisum sativum) and 4 generations for canola (Brassica napus), instead of 2-3 under normal glasshouse conditions. We demonstrate that speed breeding in fully-enclosed controlled-environment growth chambers can accelerate plant development for research purposes, including phenotyping of adult plant traits, mutant studies, and transformation. The use of supplemental lighting in a glasshouse environment allows rapid generation cycling through single seed descent and potential for adaptation to larger-scale crop improvement programs. Cost-saving through LED supplemental lighting is also outlined. We envisage great potential for integrating speed breeding with other modern crop breeding technologies, including high-throughput genotyping, genome editing, and genomic selection, accelerating the rate of crop improvement.
Subfields: Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64de1cec9a48b42b03c9412c57afb58b98f55d06
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Citations in the corpus
- Opportunities and challenges of speed breeding: A review (2021, background): “Light sources emitting photosynthetic active radiation (PAR) within the range of 400– 700 nm with an intensity of 360– 650 μmol/m2/s have been successfully used in many crops, including wheat, barley, chickpea, pea and canola to facilitate speed breeding (Ghosh et al., 2018; Watson et al., 2018).”
- Gene Pyramiding for Sustainable Crop Improvement against Biotic and Abiotic Stresses (2020, background): “breeding”, through shortening the life cycle of plants with a controlled temperature and enhanced photoperiod [181,182].”