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Review
. 2022 Feb 10;11(2):275.
doi: 10.3390/biology11020275.

Breeding More Crops in Less Time: A Perspective on Speed Breeding

Kajal Samantara  1 , Abhishek Bohra  2 , Sourav Ranjan Mohapatra  3 , Riry Prihatini  4 , Flora Asibe  5 , Lokendra Singh  6 , Vincent P Reyes  7 , Abha Tiwari  2 , Alok Kumar Maurya  2 , Janine S Croser  8 , Shabir Hussain Wani  9 , Kadambot H M Siddique  8 , Rajeev K Varshney  10   11
Affiliations
Review

Breeding More Crops in Less Time: A Perspective on Speed Breeding

Kajal Samantara et al. Biology (Basel). .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: breeding cycle; gene editing; genetic gain; genomic selection; photoperiod; single seed descent.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Timelines of varietal development with (a) conventional breeding and (b) speed breeding. The image was created using BioRender (https://biorender.com/ accessed on 20 January 2022).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Integration of SB with other breeding techniques accelerates the rate of progress. The homozygous lines for research and breeding purposes can be obtained expeditiously through hastening procedures aimed at (a) DH production, (b) marker-assisted selection, and (c) gene editing. The image was created using BioRender (https://biorender.com/ accessed on 20 January 2022).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Retrospect, current methods, applications, and challenges of speed breeding.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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