Breeding crops to feed 10 billion.

Crop improvements can help us to meet the challenge of feeding a population of 10 billion, but can we breed better varieties fast enough? Technologies such as genotyping, marker-assisted selection, high-throughput phenotyping, genome editing, genomic selection and de novo domestication could be galvanized by using speed breeding to enable plant breeders to keep pace with a changing environment and ever-increasing human population.

Citation

Hickey, L. T., N. Hafeez, A., Robinson, H., Jackson, S. A., Leal-Bertioli, S. C. M., Tester, M., … Wulff, B. B. H. (2019). Breeding crops to feed 10 billion. Nature Biotechnology, 37(7), 744–754. doi:10.1038/s41587-019-0152-9

Acknowledgements

We thank V. Korzun and C. Uauy for feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript, T. Draeger for discussions, and T. Florio (www.flozbox.com/Science.illustrated) for the artwork. B.W. was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council cross-institute strategic programme Designing Future Wheat (BB/P016855/1) and the 2Blades Foundation, M.T. by King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, L.T.H. by an Australian Research Council Early Career Discovery Research Award (DE170101296), C.G. by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31788103), and S.L.-B. by the Peanut Foundation.