11-16
Speed Breeding: Potential and Challenges
Authors: Suprava Acharya, Mukti Ram Poudel, Binju Maharjan, Rishav Pandit, Bigyan KC, Rashmi Regmi, Bishnu Bhusal, Pritika
Number of views: 155
Speed breeding has established itself as a flexible, noble plant breeding approach to enhance the plant breeding process. With the use of pro-longed photoperiod of 22hr duration daylight followed by 2 hrs. of night light, speed breeding has become successful in achieving more generations of crops in a year. Speed breeding has successfully achieved a higher genetic gain of the crops through reduced breeding cycle. Higher genetic gain is the need of today's world to compensate for the impacts of increasing food demand and climate change created due to global population expansion. Focusing on these problems and its consequences, speed breeding can play an impactful role in plant breeding history. There are both challenges and opportunities for speed breeding, whether to be flexible with its protocol and expand to a broader horizon or stick to the limited achievements without flexibility. The changing habit and habitat of the plants in response to the changing weather conditions, the dependency of the generation cycle on the variable climatic and environmental factors, the flexibility of the speed breeding protocols with different cultivars, costing of the approach and its adaptation in the farmers' field can be seen as significant challenges for speed breeding. While speed breeding can take these challenges as opportunities to find a way out for these obstacles through integration with different new breeding technologies like genomic selection, programmable nucleases, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), and CRISPR- associated (Cas) proteins.