Speed breeding is a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding

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

Design and analysis of multi-year field trials for annual crops

This chapter provides a brief discussion on the design and analysis (prediction and interpretation) of field trials, focusing on multi-environment yield trials for annual crops

Association mapping of rust resistance in pre-green revolution wheat accessions

Association mapping detects correlations between genotypes and phenotypes in a sample of individuals based on the linkage disequilibrium and can be used to uncover new genetic variation among germplasm collections. Two hundred and five landraces collected by the English botanist A. Watkins in the 1920s were screened for rust response variation under field conditions during three crop seasons. An integrated map of 350 polymorphic DArT markers was developed. Association mapping identified the involvement of several genomic regions in controlling resistance to three rust diseases. Seven, eight and nine genomic regions, respectively, appeared to carry yet uncharacterized leaf rust, stripe rust and stem rust resistance. Three dimensional analyses indicated genetic association of leaf rust and stripe rust resistance in some accessions, whereas no such association was observed between stem rust resistance and resistance to either of the other two rust diseases. A new stripe rust resistance locus, Yr47, has been named