Crop improvements can help us to meet the challenge of feeding a population of 10 billion, but can we breed better varieties fast enough?
Farmers and plant breeders are in a race against time. The world population is growing rapidly, requiring ever more food, but the amount of cultivable land is limited. Warmer temperatures have extended growth seasons in some areas — and brought drought and pests to others.
While a host of fascinating innovations are primed to change the face of agriculture, there remains a stubborn limiting factor for plant breeding. This is the long generation times of crops that allow only one or two generations per year.
This roadblock to progress has been alleviated by speed breeding protocols developed by research teams at the John Innes Centre and the University of Queensland.
Fast-growing plants in the crop-speed breeding facility at The University of Queensland. The plants featured are barley plants. Credit: The University of Queensland
“We face a grand challenge in terms of feeding the world,” said Lee Hickey, a plant geneticist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “If you look at the stats, we’re going to have about 10 billion on the planet by 2050 and we’re going to need 60 to 80 percent more food to feed everybody. It’s an even greater challenge in the face of climate change and diseases that affect our crops that are also rapidly evolving.”
NASA experiments to grow wheat in space using continuous light on wheat which triggered early reproduction in the plants were the inspiration for University of Queensland scientists to develop the world’s first ‘speed breeding’ procedures here on planet Earth.
The team tricked the crops into flowering early by blasting blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 62 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Last November, in a paper in Nature, they showed that they can grow up to six generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year, whereas traditional methods would only yield one or two.
Dr Lee Hickey in his speed breeding lab at University of Queensland, 20 June 2016.
Botanists first started growing plants under artificial light — carbon arc lamps — 150 years ago. Since then, advances in LED technology have vastly improved the precision with which scientists can adjust and customise light settings to individual crop species.
So far, the researchers have mainly experimented with one parameter, light, but they have plans to investigate several other method of increasing, growth and generation times.
The team highlight that speed breeding combines well with a range of other developing technologies. These include speed gene cloning a technique developed by Dr Wulff’s team at the John Innes Centre to rapidly scour the genomes of wild relatives of modern crops to identify disease resistance genes which can be bred into elite crops.
This involves using hydroponic culture which gives plant roots quicker access to nutrients and oxygen. A carbon dioxide-enriched atmosphere is also under investigation and one of the most productive areas of research is likely to be temperature.
“One technology alone is not going to solve our problems,” Dr. Hickey said. “We’re going to need all the tools in the shed.”
Dr Hickey believes the sky is the limit for the new technology and he is now investigating the integration of speed breeding with other modern crop breeding technologies.
“It could also have some great applications in future vertical farming systems, and some horticultural crops,” Dr Hickey said.
A review published in the journal Nature Biotechnology outlines continuing efforts to harness speed breeding to a raft of crop technology innovations required to meet the 2050 challenge.