Abstract
The growing human population and a changing environment have raised significant concern for global food security, with the current improvement rate of several important crops inadequate to meet future demand1. This slow improvement rate is attributed partly to the long generation times of crop plants. Here, we present a method called ‘speed breeding’, which greatly shortens generation time and accelerates breeding and research programmes. Speed breeding can be used to achieve up to 6 generations per year for spring wheat (Triticum aestivum), durum wheat (T. durum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), chickpea (Cicer arietinum) and pea (Pisum sativum), and 4 generations for canola (Brassica napus), instead of 2–3 under normal glasshouse conditions. We demonstrate that speed breeding in fully enclosed, controlled-environment growth chambers can accelerate plant development for research purposes, including phenotyping of adult plant traits, mutant studies and transformation. The use of supplemental lighting in a glasshouse environment allows rapid generation cycling through single seed descent (SSD) and potential for adaptation to larger-scale crop improvement programs. Cost saving through light-emitting diode (LED) supplemental lighting is also outlined. We envisage great potential for integrating speed breeding with other modern crop breeding technologies, including high-throughput genotyping, genome editing and genomic selection, accelerating the rate of crop improvement.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ray, D. K., Mueller, N. D., West, P. C. & Foley, J. A. Yield trends are insufficient to double global crop production by 2050. PloS ONE 8, e66428 (2013).
Sysoeva, M. I., Markovskaya, E. F. & Shibaeva, T. G. Plants under continuous light: A review. Plant Stress 4, 5–17 (2010).
Deng, W. et al. Dawn and dusk set states of the circadian oscillator in sprouting barley (Hordeum vulgare) seedlings. PloS ONE 10, e0129781 (2015).
Domoney, C. et al. Exploiting a fast neutron mutant genetic resource in Pisum sativum (pea) for functional genomics. Funct. Plant Biol. 40, 1261–1270 (2013).
Zheng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, G., Yan, G. & Liu, C. A procedure allowing up to eight generations of wheat and nine generations of barley per annum. Euphytica 191, 311–316 (2013).
Went, F. The effect of temperature on plant growth. Annu. Rev. Plant Physiol. 4, 347–362 (1953).
Chahal, G. & Gosal, S. Principles and Procedures of Plant Breeding: Biotechnological and Conventional Approaches (Alpha Science International Ltd, Pangbourne, 2002).
Wada, K. C. & Takeno, K. Stress-induced flowering. Plant Signal. Behav. 5, 944–947 (2010).
Derkx, A. P., Orford, S., Griffiths, S., Foulkes, M. J. & Hawkesford, M. J. Identification of differentially senescing mutants of wheat and impacts on yield, biomass and nitrogen partitioning. J. Integr. Plant Biol. 54, 555–566 (2012).
Hoogendorn, J., Pfeiffer, W. H., Rajaram, S. & Gale, M. D. in Proc. 7th Int. Wheat Genetics Symp. (eds Koebner, R. M. D. & Miller, T. E.) 1093–1100 (IPSR, Cambridge, 1988).
Riaz, A., Periyannan, S., Aitken, E. & Hickey, L. A rapid phenotyping method for adult plant resistance to leaf rust in wheat. Plant Methods 12, 17 (2016).
Hickey, L. T. et al. Rapid phenotyping for adult‐plant resistance to stripe rust in wheat. Plant Breeding 131, 54–61 (2012).
Lundqvist, U. & Wettstein, D. V. Induction of eceriferum mutants in barley by ionizing radiations and chemical mutagens. Hereditas 48, 342–362 (1962).
Riley, R. Genetic control of the cytological diploid behaviour of hexaploid wheat. Nature 182, 713–715 (1958).
Liu, X. Y., Macmillan, R., Burrow, R., Kadkol, G. & Halloran, G. Pendulum test for evaluation of the rupture strength of seed pods. J. Texture Stud. 25, 179–190 (1994).
Raman, H. et al. Genome-wide delineation of natural variation for pod shatter resistance in Brassica napus. PloS ONE 9, e101673 (2014).
Stetter, M. G. et al. Crossing methods and cultivation conditions for rapid production of segregating populations in three grain amaranth species. Front. Plant Sci. 7, 816 (2016).
O’Connor, D. J. et al. Development and application of speed breeding technologies in a commercial peanut breeding program. Peanut Science 40, 107–114 (2013).
Mobini, S. H. & Warkentin, T. D. A simple and efficient method of in vivo rapid generation technology in pea (Pisum sativum L.). In Vitro Cell. Dev. Plant 52, 530–536 (2016).
Hickey, L. T. et al. Screening for grain dormancy in segregating generations of dormant × non-dormant crosses in white-grained wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Euphytica 172, 183–195 (2010).
Hickey, L. T. et al. Speed breeding for multiple disease resistance in barley. Euphytica 213, 64–78 (2017).
Steuernagel, B. et al. Rapid cloning of disease-resistance genes in plants using mutagenesis and sequence capture. Nat. Biotechnol. 34, 652–655 (2016).
Sánchez-Martín, J. et al. Rapid gene isolation in barley and wheat by mutant chromosome sequencing. Genome Biol. 17, 221 (2016).
Krasileva, K. V. et al. Uncovering hidden variation in polyploid wheat. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, E913–E921 (2017).
Liang, Z. et al. Efficient DNA-free genome editing of bread wheat using CRISPR/Cas9 ribonucleoprotein complexes. Nat. Commun. 8, 14261 (2017).
Cavanagh, C. R. et al. Genome-wide comparative diversity uncovers multiple targets of selection for improvement in hexaploid wheat landraces and cultivars. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, 8057–8062 (2013).
Hao, X., Zheng, J. & Brown, J. in 6th Int. Symp. Light in Horticulture 61 (ISHS, Tsukuba, 2011).
Kadkol, G., Halloran, G. & MacMillan, R. Evaluation of Brassica genotypes for resistance to shatter. II. Variation in siliqua strengh within and between accessions. Euphytica 34, 915–924 (1985).
Wingen, L. U. et al. Establishing the AE Watkins landrace cultivar collection as a resource for systematic gene discovery in bread wheat. Theor. Appl. Genet. 127, 1831–1842 (2014).
Gosman, N., Steed, A., Chandler, E., Thomsett, M. & Nicholson, P. Evaluation of type I fusarium head blight resistance of wheat using non‐deoxynivalenol‐producing fungi. Plant Pathol. 59, 147–157 (2010).
Harwood, W. A. in Cereal Genomics: Methods and Protocols Vol. 1099 (eds Henry, R. & Furtado, A.) 251–260 (Humana Press, Totowa, 2014).
Smedley, M. A. & Harwood, W. A. in Agrobacterium Protocols: Methods in Molecular Biology Vol. 1223 (ed. Wang, K.) 3–16 (Springer, New York, 2015).
Sears, E. R. Genetics society of canada award of excellence lecture an induced mutant with homoeologous pairing in common wheat. Can. J. Genet. Cytol. 19, 585–593 (1977).
Sharma, A. K. & Sharma, A. Chromosome Techniques: Theory and Practice (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2014).
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, UK, the Two Blades Foundation, USA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK, and the International Wheat Yield Partnership, grant number IWYP76. S.G. was supported by a Monsanto Beachell-Borlaug International Scholarship. A.W. was supported by an Australian Post-Graduate Award and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) Industry Top-Up Scholarship, project code GRS11008. The PBI facilities used in this project were funded with assistance from GRDC, project code US00053. H.R. also received funding by GRDC, project code DAN00208. J.B., D.E. and H.R. received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), project codes LP130100925 (J.B., D.E. and H.R.) and LP130100061 (D.E. and J.B.). M.A.M.H. was supported by a fellowship from Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia. The authors also give thanks to the ARC for an Early Career Discovery Research Award, project code DE170101296, to L.T.H. We are grateful to the JIC, UQ and PBI horticultural staff for plant husbandry, M. Qiu (WWAI) for pod anatomy photography, A. Davis (JIC) for photography and J. Brown (JIC) for helpful discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
A.W. and S.G. performed the experiments for studying two generations of wheat and barley under Speed breeding I and II, managed and oversaw the other experiments and wrote the manuscript. A.W. performed experiments studying growth of canola and chickpea under Speed breeding II. Speed breeding I: N.M.A. grew and evaluated the phenotype of the barley eceriferum mutants; S.A.B. provided advice for growth conditions; J.S. made the crosses and some germination tests; M.-D.R. conducted chromosome association studies during meiosis in wheat; M.A.M.H. studied development of transgenic barley lines; A.H. and W.H. contributed to design and execution of barley transformation tests; A.S. performed the inoculation and phenotyping for wheat Fusarium headblight infections; L.E.D. and S.A.B. selected and grew varieties involved in the flowering time phenotype; A.K., A.B. and C.R. performed all testing and measuring for Medicago; T.R. and C.D. performed the same for rapid cycling pea; D.R. and J.Z. filmed plant growth, created timelapse videos and performed growth phenotypic analysis; J.C. performed the energy calculations and provided some necessary data for such; C.U., G.M. and P.N. contributed experiment design, variety choice and phenotypes. Speed breeding II: A.R., D.E. and J.B. designed and conducted the initial pilot experiments on canola under speed breeding; H.R. contributed to the design and phenotyping of canola pod shatter resistance; M.R. and W.M. provided the chickpea varieties suitable for evaluation under speed breeding; M.J.D. and I.H.D. first came up with the idea of speed breeding and developed the initial framework for the protocol at UQ, Brisbane. A.R. and L.T.H. designed and conducted initial pilot experiments investigating harvest of immature wheat seed. Speed breeding III: M.J.W., W.S.C. and R.F.P. were involved in building, testing and implementing the cheaper, full LED version of speed breeding in closed environments. B.B.H.W. and L.T.H. contributed to the idea of conducting and summarizing these experiments in the manuscript, and contributed in terms of intellectual input for the experiments. All authors were involved in the writing of the manuscript and providing corrections and suggestions.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Figures 1–14, Supplementary Tables 1–41, Supplementary References
Supplementary Video 1
Timelapse video recording comparing plant growth under speed breeding condition I and glasshouse conditions in United Kingdom summertime without any supplementary light. Video depicts three replicates of Triticum aestivum cv. Paragon sown and recorded under each treatment, with two replicates removed after stem extension stage was reached in each condition. Recordings were made using the CropQuant workstation developed by Ji Zhou and colleagues at the John Innes Centre [Supplementary Reference 4]. Germinated seedlings of Paragon were sown on 17 March 2017. Growth curves are illustrated in Supplementary Fig. 10.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Watson, A., Ghosh, S., Williams, M.J. et al. Speed breeding is a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding. Nature Plants 4, 23–29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-017-0083-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-017-0083-8
This article is cited by
-
A platform for whole-genome speed introgression from Aegilops tauschii to wheat for breeding future crops
Nature Protocols (2024)
-
Understanding the Concept of Speed Breeding in Crop Improvement: Opportunities and Challenges Towards Global Food Security
Tropical Plant Biology (2024)
-
Designing future peanut: the power of genomics-assisted breeding
Theoretical and Applied Genetics (2024)
-
Bacillus velezensis BE2 controls wheat and barley diseases by direct antagonism and induced systemic resistance
Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (2024)
-
Toxic effects of lead on plants: integrating multi-omics with bioinformatics to develop Pb-tolerant crops
Planta (2024)