Abstract
Speed breeding by artificial control of photothermal conditions facilitates generation advancement but was limited in scale and cost. In this study, we demonstrated a cost-saving off-site summer nursery pattern, taking full advantage of shorter daylength and higher temperature with lower latitude compared to the origin of the soybean cultivars used in the study. This substantially reduced the generation cycles under totally natural conditions. Using this approach, two generations of soybean cultivars from Northeastern Spring Planting Region (NE) and Yellow-Huai-Hai Valleys Summer Planting Region (YHH) were successfully obtained in Beijing and Hainan, respectively, compared to one generation in origin. Fresh-seeding method was also used to further shorten the generation duration by 7–10 days, thereby allowing at least four generations per year. Using DNA markers to define haplotypes of maturity genes E1–E4, we proposed a model to predict the optimum adaptation region of the advanced generation lines. Taken together, we present a speed-breeding methodology combining off-site nursery, fresh-seeding method, and marker-assisted selection, aimed at accelerating soybean improvement.
Highlights
Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] is one of the important oil crops in China due to its industrial use and domestic consumption
Short daylength and high temperature are the superlative environments for accelerating the growth and development of short-day plants such as soybean (Mao et al, 2017)
We tried to speed up breeding of Northeastern Spring Planting Region (NE) soybean by summer nursery in the Yellow-Huai-Hai Valleys Summer Planting Region (YHH) regions
Summary
Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] is one of the important oil crops in China due to its industrial use and domestic consumption. There is an urgent demand for high-yielding soybean cultivars to reduce the importation from other countries. Cross-breeding is an effective breeding method in a great majority of crops, including soybean, and usually more productive and/or with other desirable characteristics from rich genetic variation by hybridization (Gai et al, 2015). Cross-breeding in soybean is time-consuming, generally requires at least eight generations from the crossing of selected parents to genetically stable lines for selection and evaluation. More than four generations are required to develop pure lines in this process. This slow development rate is attributed partially to the lengthy generation cycles, which
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