Abstract
Simple SummaryFeeding our growing population is one of the primary concerns of plant breeders. Plant breeding needs to deliver a steady stream of modern cultivars in a time- and resource-efficient manner. This review discusses the speed breeding (SB) techniques which allow breeders to advance the crop generation in a shorter period of time. In addition, we highlight the current SB applications in major crops and explore ways to integrate SB with new breeding techniques for efficient and faster production of stable lines for basic and applied research.Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and the subsequent crossing of desirable plants. The duration of the seed-to-seed cycle is one of the crucial bottlenecks in the progress of plant research and breeding. In this context, speed breeding (SB), relying mainly on photoperiod extension, temperature control, and early seed harvest, has the potential to accelerate the rate of plant improvement. Well demonstrated in the case of long-day plants, the SB protocols are being extended to short-day plants to reduce the generation interval time. Flexibility in SB protocols allows them to align and integrate with diverse research purposes including population development, genomic selection, phenotyping, and genomic editing. In this review, we discuss the different SB methodologies and their application to hasten future plant improvement. Though SB has been extensively used in plant phenotyping and the pyramiding of multiple traits for the development of new crop varieties, certain challenges and limitations hamper its widespread application across diverse crops. However, the existing constraints can be resolved by further optimization of the SB protocols for critical food crops and their efficient integration in plant breeding pipelines.
Highlights
IntroductionThe current human population is around 7.8 billion and is estimated to reach nearly. 2050 [1]
The current human population is around 7.8 billion and is estimated to reach nearlyTheby current human population is around7.8 billion is estimatedmore to reach nearly 2050 [1].Climatic fluctuations involving risingand temperatures, frequent9.9 billion by [1].Climatic fluctuations involving rising temperatures, more frequent floods, and drought are predicted to lead to novel diseases and more frequent pest out‐floods, and drought areplant predicted to lead to novel more frequent pest outbreaks, requiring an agile breeding response [2].diseasesLin et al.and [3] highlighted the urgent breaks, requiring an agile plant breeding response [2]
60–70% humidity is recommended for optimum plant growth and accelerated breeding
Summary
The current human population is around 7.8 billion and is estimated to reach nearly. 2050 [1]. Since the 1940s, the speed of plant lifecycle turnover has been manipulated in plant breeding using techniques such as single‐seed descent [9,10] and shuttle breeding [11]. The advent of advanced LED lighting systems complemented efforts to accelerate lifecycle turnover, enabling manipulation of wavelength composition to trigger light responses, such as shade avoidance, and encourage rapid progression to flowering [21,22,23,24,25]. A combination of SB technology and marker-assisted selection (MAS) has accelerated development of herbicide-tolerant chickpea [40] and the introgression of valuable allelic variation from wild relatives in lentil [41] These practical breeding outcomes highlight the potential of the global suite of SB techniques to substantially accelerate genetic gain
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