Speed Breeding: Accelerating the Future of Crop Improvement

Abstract

Traditional crop breeding takes a lot of time, space, and resources because selecting and crossing plants often involves long seed-to-seed cycles. Speed breeding (SB) offers a faster way to improve crops by extending daylight, controlling temperature, and harvesting seeds earlier. These methods shorten the time needed to grow new plant generations and have been especially effective in long-day plants, with efforts now expanding to short-day plants. SB is flexible and can support various research activities, such as developing plant populations, genomic selection, phenotyping, and gene editing. This review highlights the methods and applications of SB in speeding up plant improvement. While SB has been successful in improving traits and creating new crop varieties, some challenges, like limited use in certain crops, still need to be addressed. Optimizing SB techniques for major food crops and integrating them into breeding programs could overcome these issues and help make plant breeding more efficient in the future.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199956056.2026.17-26