Abstract

Speed Breeding: A Look at More Crops in Less Time

Author(s): Nikolas Brown

Traditional crop breeding necessitates a significant amount of time, area, and resources for selection, as well as the following crossing of suitable plants. One of the most important bottlenecks in plant breeding and research is the length of the seed-to-seed cycle. Speed breeding (SB), which primarily relies on photoperiod extension, temperature control, and early seed harvest, has the potential to accelerate the rate of plant improvement in this context. The SB methods are being expanded to short-day plants to shorten the generation interval time, as they have been proved in the case of long-day plants. SB methods are flexible enough to align and integrate with a variety of research goals, such as population development, genomic selection, phenotyping, and genomic editing. In this overview, we look at the various SB approaches and how they might be used to speed up future plant improvement. Despite the fact that SB has been widely utilised in plant phenotyping and the pyramiding of numerous traits for the production of novel crop varieties, it faces a number of obstacles and limits. The aforementioned limits, however, can be overcome by further optimising SB methods for essential food crops and integrating them into plant breeding pipelines