Plant Breeders and seed companies, don’t miss this! Advance your crop generations faster with speed breeding.
Plant breeders often need to grow several generations of a crop to develop a new variety. This process, especially from F2 to F5 or F6 generations, can take many years using traditional methods. But with speed breeding, this time can be reduced to just over a year. This process is called Rapid Generation Advancement (RGA). This method is crucial in breeding pipelines, especially for crops where 6–8 generations are typically required to develop homozygous lines.

How Speed Breeding Enables RGA
Speed Breeding (SB) is the backbone of RGA. By optimizing environmental conditions such as photoperiod, temperature, humidity, and light quality, it helps plants grow faster. The use of spectral lights with specific red, far-red, and blue wavelengths further accelerates flowering and seed development. When combined with the Single Seed Descent (SSD) method, where only one seed per plant is used to progress to the next generation, speed breeding becomes a powerful tool for RGA. This approach is particularly effective in self-pollinated crops like wheat, barley, mustard, chickpea, rice, and pea, where uniformity and genetic fixation are essential before field testing and release. This approach saves a lot of time and effort. What used to take 5 to 6 years can now be done in 12 to 14 months. Breeders can fix desirable traits faster and move promising lines to field trials earlier.

The significance of RGA combined with speed breeding in the seed sector is profound
1. Reduces breeding cycle duration by 60–80%
2. Quick fixation of homozygous lines for field evaluation
3. Faster development of inbred lines, RILs, and hybrid parents
4. Ideal for marker-assisted selection (MAS) and QTL mapping programs
5. Helps in fast-tracking trait introgression and climate-resilient varieties
6. Strengthens seed pipeline by delivering varieties faster to farmers

The School of Speed Breeding offers generation advancement services to seed companies and plant breeders, helping them move quickly from early generations like F2 to F5 or F6 using speed breeding techniques tailored to different crops.

So, if you are working on crop improvement, SoSB is here to help you make it faster and better.

Contact us on

Mobile: +91-8130997511

Email: enquiry@iht.edu.in