SPEED BREEDING New Technology Shows Promise
By Tim Linden R esearchers in Australia first began looking at a new technique called speed breeding eight years ago, and U.S. researchers have followed suit with their own trial projects in recent years. The concept involves exposing plants to an inordinate amount of light in a close greenhouse environment in an effort to speed up the growing process and produce new generations of seeds in a much quicker fashion. The initial research in Australia involved
tomato would be a good candidate as well. She explained that the concept involves exposing a plant to 22 hours of artificial light and two hours of dark. “That technique has significantly sped up the life cycle of production,” she said. In Australia, researchers have been able to produce six generations of wheat plants per year as opposed to one annual crop in the field and two or three under normal greenhouse conditions. This technique allows for much quicker development of new varieties with positive
wheat but there have also been some efforts to apply the new technique to vegetables and other crops. Stephanie Sjoberg, a PhD candidate in plant breeding in the Crop & Soil Science Department at Washington State University, is one U.S. researcher working on the idea. She is currently
traits being bred into the plants in a much quicker fashion. Sjoberg said the research has shown that the speeding of the plants production has no adverse effect on the development of the seeds being produced about every six weeks or so. She did say that this technique would not work when actually trying to produce a fruit or a vegetable
working on wheat and came to WSU in 2016 to pursue this line of research. Previously she was in the vegetable seed industry with Bayer for a half a dozen years and also worked for H.M. Clause and Monsanto. Her career is in plant breeding and admits that her current work with wheat revolves around the fact that it is a major agronomic crop and there is available funding for such crops. She said the speed breeding work in Australia is very interesting, the concept is well known among the plant breeding community, and she believes there is applicability for a variety of crops, noting that work has been done on wheat, barley, canola, chickpeas and brassicas among others. Sjoberg believes the
as the passage of a time in a plant’s normal growth is needed to grow a crop to fruition, but harvesting seeds has proven to be a different matter. The importance cannot be overstated as it typically takes five or six generations of plant breeding to develop new parental lines to produce seeds with the new positive traits that a producer would be looking for. If those parental lines can be produced in one year rather than five or six the advantages are obvious. Sjoberg said the development of the speed breeding work across many different plant lines will have a “huge impact” on the
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