Chapter 2 - Speed breeding – a climate smart tool to accelerate research in wheat

Abstract

Research and improvement in many crop plants are limited by the long generation time, which demands the need for technologies that accelerate plant development and generation turnover. Speed breeding uses extended photoperiod using supplementary lighting and temperature control to accelerate the development rate of plants, enabling rapid generation advancement. In wheat, speed breeding can achieve five generations per year when performed in polyhouse under controlled conditions compared to 1–2 generations in the field. Moreover, rapid phenotyping of leaf and stem rust reaction in wheat under speed breeding can be completed in 7 weeks, which allow for round the year evaluation and faster development of rust resistance lines. Integration of speed breeding with other crop improvement technologies including high-throughput genotyping, marker-assisted selection, genomic selection, genome editing, and so on could accelerate the rate of crop improvement.