Accelerated plant breeding

The time to develop new cultivars and introduce them into cultivation is an issue of major importance in plant breeding. This is because plant breeders have an urgent need to help provide solutions to feed a growing world population, while in parallel, time savings are linked to profitability. Plant breeding processes may in general be broken down into the following five key elements: (1) germplasm variation; (2) crossing; (3) generation of new genetic combinations; (4) screening and selection (identification and subsequent fixation of desired allelic combinations); and (5) line/cultivar development. Each of these has implications in relation to the time taken to breed a new cultivar; a brief introduction is given for each to highlight the obstacles that may be targeted in accelerating the breeding process. Specific techniques that provide a time advantage for these elements are then discussed. Some targets for enhancing the efficiency of plant breeding, e.g., the manipulation of meiotic recombination, have proven to be recalcitrant. However, other methods that create new genetic variation along with improvements in selection efficiency compensate to a large extent for this limitation. Progress in accelerating the plant breeding process continues by exploiting new emerging ideas in science and technology.