Science Looks to Artificial Intelligence to Assist in Speed Breeding

A field of wheat ripens under the Arizona sun. (Courtesy of Hayden Flour Mills)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to play a significant role in helping to address global food security challenges, researchers from The University of Queensland, Australia, claim.

The scientists say artificial intelligence can assist in food production to feed 10 billion people by 2050.

Professor Lee Hickey from Queensland’s Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) is the team leader of predictive agriculture at the University of Queensland and thinks AI can offer opportunities to produce high-yielding plants and animals.

“Breeders are collecting billions of data points, but the big challenge is how we turn this colossal amount of data into knowledge to support smarter decisions in the breeding process,” Professor Hickey said.

“AI can help to identify which plants and animals we use for crossing or carry forward to the next generation.”

Advantages Of This Technology

Prof. Hickey explained that they are trying to integrate AI with speed breeding to create new, disease-resistant varieties of wheat and barley.

Additionally, he thinks this technology has wide application to other plants and animals because the goal is the same—to bring traits together as soon as possible and give this package to the farmers who can apply it.

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For the last 10 years, the group has spent a lot of time developing protocols on speed breeding and communicated these outcomes with groups around the world to establish the technology, which, together with AI is the new frontier in plant and animal breeding, Prof. Hikey argues.

The co-inventor of the technology for genomic prediction and speed breeding is Professor Ben Hayes from QAAFI, who, along with his team, found four ways to use AI in plant and animal speed breeding.

“The first one is deciding what to breed—it might sound simple, but this decision is becoming more complex. In an increasingly challenging environment, consumer acceptance will be more important, so AI is a good way to pull together the preferences of millions of people,” said Prof. Hayes.

“The second use involves analysing images taken on a large scale to capture genetic variation between related lines of plants and certain traits in animals that we want.

“The third area is to take genetic markers and use that information to predict how good a variety is going to be for breeding.”

The fourth application of AI will change how scientists perceive breeding.

“It’s a change from looking at individual genetic lines to thinking about a breeding population as a collection of chunks of DNA that are good for a trait,” he explained.

“You might have one good chromosome segment in a line that is otherwise not so good, but AI can identify the optimal crossing path to combine it with other segments across the genome and develop a new and superior genotype.

“The crosses needed to bring together the AI-selected beneficial segments can be progressed rapidly using speed breeding, which allows researchers to turn over multiple generations very quickly.

“Together, AI-informed selection with speed breeding allows researchers and breeders to generate vastly superior genotypes, ready for evaluation, in just a year or two.”

This new application of AI in speed breeding was published by Prof. Hickey and Prof. Hayes in Nature Biotechnology.

What Is Speed Breeding

Speed breeding is a plant breeding technique that aims to accelerate the process of developing new plant varieties with desirable traits, such as increased yield, disease resistance, and nutritional content.

It involves creating controlled environments that optimize the growth conditions for plants, allowing them to complete their life cycles much more quickly than they would under natural conditions.

The primary goal of speed breeding is to reduce the time it takes to produce multiple generations of plants, enabling plant breeders to select and propagate desirable traits more rapidly.

Several techniques and technologies are employed in speed breeding to achieve this accelerated growth which are as follows:

Controlled Environment: Speed breeding takes place in carefully controlled environments such as growth chambers, greenhouses, or specialized light setups. These controlled conditions include temperature, humidity, light intensity, and photoperiod (duration of light exposure), which are all optimized for rapid plant growth.

Enhanced Lighting: High-intensity artificial lighting, often using LED technology, is used to provide plants with the required light spectrum and intensity for optimal growth. This extended and intense light exposure enables plants to photosynthesize more efficiently and grow faster.

Continuous Light: Instead of following natural day-night cycles, plants in speed breeding setups are often exposed to continuous light, which eliminates the dark period that would slow down growth. This encourages rapid vegetative growth and shortens the time needed for flowering.

Hydroponics or Aeroponics: Speed breeding can also involve hydroponic or aeroponic systems, where plants are grown in nutrient-rich solutions or in air with nutrient mist, respectively. These methods provide plants with optimal nutrients, leading to faster growth.

Genetic Techniques: Some speed breeding methods involve the use of genetic modifications or biotechnology to further enhance plant growth rates and development. However, the use of such techniques can vary depending on the regulations and ethical considerations of different regions.

Speed breeding has proven to be particularly useful for crops with long growth cycles, such as wheat, barley, and certain tree species. By rapidly cycling through generations, breeders can more quickly identify and propagate desirable traits, ultimately leading to the development of improved plant varieties.

This technique has the potential to contribute to global food security by accelerating the process of developing crops that are more resilient to diseases, pests, and changing environmental conditions. Especially when this approach is combined with AI technology.

AI offers great potential to contribute to addressing food security challenges. However, it’s important to consider ethical, social, and economic implications. Access to AI technologies, data privacy concerns, and the potential displacement of labour in traditional agriculture are factors that need to be carefully managed.

Collaborative efforts involving governments, organizations, researchers, and farmers are essential to ensure that AI solutions are implemented in ways that benefit all stakeholders and contribute to sustainable global food systems.

Challenges Of Speed Breeding

While speed breeding offers several advantages, there are also some challenges to consider.

Environmental Stress: The optimized growth conditions used in speed breeding, such as continuous light and controlled temperature, might shield plants from certain environmental stresses that they would face in natural or field conditions. As a result, the plants bred through speed breeding may not accurately represent their performance in real-world settings.

Genetic Diversity Concerns: The accelerated growth in speed breeding may limit the genetic diversity of the resulting plant populations. This could potentially lead to reduced adaptability and resilience of the plants to changing environmental conditions, pests, and diseases.

Ethical Considerations: Some critics may raise ethical concerns about manipulating plants to grow at accelerated rates, potentially pushing the boundaries of natural growth processes. These concerns could range from questions about the well-being of the plants to broader philosophical considerations about human intervention in natural systems.

Consumer Acceptance: Plants developed through speed breeding could face challenges in gaining consumer acceptance, especially if concerns about genetic modification, unnatural growth processes, or potential health risks are raised. Public perception and attitudes toward speed-bred plants could influence market success.

We also need to keep in mind that some of these challenges might be mitigated or addressed through careful research, monitoring, and responsible implementation of speed breeding techniques. Like any innovative approach, a balanced assessment of the benefits and drawbacks is crucial for informed decision-making.