Speed Breeding Technology
The rising human population and the changing climate have raised major concerns about global food safety. Modern agriculture must feed the growing global population adequately. The current rate of improvement for many major crops is insufficient to meet potential demand. It was projected that approximately 25%-70% more agricultural production is required by 2050 in order to fulfill the food requirements of a growing population.
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This slow rate of improvement is partly due to crop production times. The scientific community has instigated “Speed Breeding” to reduce the breeding cycle and speed up crop research through rapid product development in order to overcome the restrictions of traditional crop breeding techniques in crop improvement. Speed breeding can usually take several forms. One of the most common methods is to prolong the length of daily light exposure to plants in combination with early seed harvest, by cycling fast from seed to seed so as to cut down the spells generated for long-days or non-day crops.
Speed breeding can be up to 6 generations per year for spring wheat ( Triticum aestivum), durum wheat (T. durum), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and pea (Pisum sativum) and 4 generations for canola (Brassica napus) instead of 2–3 under standard glasshouse conditions. This technique has also been successfully adapted for oat, quinoa, Brassica, Medicago truncatula, grass pea, and Brachypodium distachyon in different countries.
Speed breeding in controlled environment growth chambers can accelerate the development of plants for research purposes, including phenotyping of adult plant traits, mutant studies, and transformation. The use of additional lighting using LEDs in a glasshouse setting allows the rapid generation of single seed descent (SSD) cycling and plant density for large crop improvement programs to be scaled up. Recently, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, and the John Innes center have developed acceptable protocols for speed-breeding in glasshouses and growth chambers, along with guidance on how to create your own speed-breeding cabinet, making it possible to optimize parameters at a low cost.
The University of Queensland envisages great potential for the convergence of speed breeding with other current crop breeding technologies, including high-throughput genotyping, genome editing, and genomic selection, thereby accelerating the pace of crop improvement.
