Speed breeding – biggest advance since the post-war Green Revolution

Heralded as one of the most important advances in variety breeding since the Green Revolution of the post war period, the speed-breeding platform has been developed by teams at the John Innes Centre, University of Queensland and University of Sydney.

The system uses a glasshouse or an artificial environment with enhanced lighting to create intense day-long regimes to speed up the search for better performing crops.

Using the technique, the team achieved wheat generation from seed to seed in just eight weeks. The results, which first appeared in this week's Nature Plants, means that it is now possible to grow as many as six generations of wheat each year – a threefold increase on techniques currently used by breeders and researchers.

Dr Brande Wulff, of the John Innes Centre, Norwich, a lead author on the paper, explained why speed is of the essence: “Globally, we face a huge challenge in breeding higher yielding and more resilient crops. Being able to cycle through more generations in less time will allow us to more rapidly create and test genetic combinations, looking for the best combinations for different environments.”

For many years the improvement rates of several staple crops had plateaued, leading to a significant impediment in the quest to feed a growing global population and address the impacts of climate change.

Speed breeding, said Dr Wulff, offered a new solution to this global challenge. “People said you may be able to cycle plants fast, but they will look tiny and insignificant, and only set a few seed.

"In fact, the new technology creates plants that look better and are healthier than those using standard conditions. One colleague could not believe it when he first saw the results.”

This exciting breakthrough has the potential to rank, in terms of impact, alongside the shuttle-breeding techniques introduced after the second world war as part of the green revolution, he argued.

“I would like to think that in 10 years from now you could walk into a field and point to plants whose attributes and traits were developed using this technology,” he said.

The use of fully controlled growth environments can also be scaled up to work in a standard glass house and uses LED lights optimised to aid photosynthesis in intensive regimes of up to 22 hours per day.

LED lights significantly reduce costs compared to sodium vapour lamps which have long been in widespread use but are ineffective because they generate much heat and emit poor quality light.

The international team also proved that the speed breeding technique can be used for a range of important crops. They have achieved up to six generations per year for bread wheat, durum wheat, barley, pea, and chickpea; and four generations for canola (a form of rapeseed). This is a significant increase compared with widely used commercial breeding techniques.

Speed breeding, when employed alongside conventional field-based techniques, is seen as being an important tool to enable advances in understanding the genetics of crops.

“Speed breeding as a platform can be combined with lots of other technologies such as gene editing to get to the end result faster,” explained Dr Lee Hickey, from the University of Queensland.

His study showed that traits such as plant pathogen interactions, plant shape and structure, and flowering time can be looked at in detail and repeated using the technology.

Early adopters of the speed breeding technology include Ruth Bryant, wheat pathologist at RAGT Seeds,, Essex. She said: “Breeders are always looking for ways to speed up the process of getting a variety to market so we are really interested in the concept of speed breeding. We are working closely with Dr Wulff’s group at the John Innes Centre to develop this method in a commercial setting.”

Dr Allan Rattey, a wheat crop breeder with Australian company, Dow AgroSciences, has used the technology to breed wheat with tolerance to pre-harvest sprouting (PHS), which is a major problem in Australia.

“Environmental control for effective PHS screening and the long time taken to cycle through several cycles of recurrent selection were major bottle necks. The speed breeding and targeted selection platform have driven major gains for both of these areas of concerns,” he said.