Integrating speed breeding with artificial intelligence for developing climate-smart crops

In climate change, breeding crop plants with improved productivity, sustainability, and adaptability has become a daunting challenge to ensure global food security for the ever-growing global population. Correspondingly, climate-smart crops are also the need to regulate biomass production, which is imperative for the maintenance of ecosystem services worldwide. Since conventional breeding technologies for crop improvement are limited, time-consuming, and involve laborious selection processes to foster new and improved crop varieties. An urgent need is to accelerate the plant breeding cycle using artificial intelligence (AI) to depict plant responses to environmental perturbations in real-time.

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Speed breeding has emerged as an essential strategy for accelerating the breeding cycles of crop plants by growing them under artificial light and temperature conditions. Furthermore, speed breeding can also integrate marker-assisted selection and cutting-edged gene-editing tools for early selection and manipulation of essential crops with superior agronomic traits. Scientists have recently applied next-generation AI to delve deeper into the complex biological and molecular mechanisms that govern plant functions under environmental cues. In addition, AIs can integrate, assimilate, and analyze complex OMICS data sets, an essential prerequisite for successful speed breeding protocol implementation to breed crop plants with superior yield and adaptability.