Speed breeding enhances crop resilience and productivity in a changing climate

To enhance agricultural productivity and resilience in the face of changing climatic conditions, innovative strategies over traditional breeding methods are essential to shorten the breeding cycle for developing new climate-smart crop varieties, thereby supporting food security for a growing global population. Speed breeding (SB) is a promising cutting-edge approach to decrease crop life cycle, enabling accumulation of desirable traits in plants, thereby increasing crop yield and resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. SB integrates advanced technologies such as marker-assisted selection, genetic engineering, genome editing, and high-throughput plant phenotyping to expedite desired traits incorporation to the plant more precisely. SB technology allows plant breeders to improve selection accuracy, and boost genetic gain, thereby accelerating breeding process for improvement and development of new crop varieties. However, it requires sophisticated infrastructure, intensive management, cost and skilled personnel. This review provides updates of SB, covering its prerequisites, benefits and constraints in applications. Additionally, the synergy of SB with transgenic breeding, high-throughput phenotyping and genome editing for crop improvement is critically discussed. In summary, SB offers a potent strategy for plant breeders to mitigate climate change impacts and ensure food security through efficient agricultural research and production technologies.