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Breeding crops to feed 10 billion

Abstract

Crop improvements can help us to meet the challenge of feeding a population of 10 billion, but can we breed better varieties fast enough? Technologies such as genotyping, marker-assisted selection, high-throughput phenotyping, genome editing, genomic selection and de novo domestication could be galvanized by using speed breeding to enable plant breeders to keep pace with a changing environment and ever-increasing human population.

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Fig. 1: Timeline of key plant breeding techniques and technologies. Some events have been color-coded by theme: green, left, conventional breeding; green, right, genome engineering; brown, DNA markers; pink, genome sequences; blue, other key events.
Fig. 2: Rapid trait stacking through speed breeding and marker assisted selection.
Fig. 3: ExpressEdit approaches, in which rapid genome editing can be performed directly in the speed breeding system.
Fig. 4: Breeding strategies.
Fig. 5: ‘Supercharging’ plant growth: speed breeding 2.0.

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Acknowledgements

We thank V. Korzun and C. Uauy for feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript, T. Draeger for discussions, and T. Florio (www.flozbox.com/Science.illustrated) for the artwork. B.W. was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council cross-institute strategic programme Designing Future Wheat (BB/P016855/1) and the 2Blades Foundation, M.T. by King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, L.T.H. by an Australian Research Council Early Career Discovery Research Award (DE170101296), C.G. by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31788103), and S.L.-B. by the Peanut Foundation.

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Correspondence to Lee T. Hickey or Brande B. H. Wulff.

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H.R. is an employee of Intergrain, which produces and markets plant breeding materials.

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Hickey, L.T., N. Hafeez, A., Robinson, H. et al. Breeding crops to feed 10 billion. Nat Biotechnol 37, 744–754 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0152-9

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