Speed breeding methods for soybean improvement: recent advances

Abstract

Food security is one of the key issues with the increase of world population. Continuous food production is important to enhance yield with increase of world population and food demand. Slow Soybean generation times is one of the key problems for its improvement and yield production. Speed breeding is one of the novel methods to increase the number of generations thereby decrease generation time. Many researchers have developed novel speed breeding protocols to produce early days to flower initiation, early maturity and overall growth and development of soybean genotypes, thus decreasing the generation times. Here we highlighted some of the efficient speed breeding protocols, developed by different researcher’s for important oilseeds crop soybean. This review will help researchers to use these systems for other important crop species improvement. However further work is needed to bring novelty in existing systems or to develop new speed breeding systems for enhancing yield related traits thus allowing soybean to grow at least 5 generations/year.