Scientists at the John Innes Centre, Earlham Institute, and Quadram Institute in Norwich and the University of Queensland have improved the technique, known as speed breeding, adapting it to work in vast glasshouses and in scaled-down desktop growth chambers. The scaled-down chambers are the result of an OpenPlant Fund project to develop a “Bench-top Controlled Environment Growth Chamber for Speed-Breeding and Crop Transformation”.

Two papers have been published detailing the research on speed breeding and the protocols:

Watson A, Ghosh S, Williams MJ, Cuddy WS, Simmonds J, Rey MD, Asyraf Md Hatta M, Hinchliffe A, Steed A, Reynolds D, Adamski NM, Breakspear A, Korolev A, Rayner T, Dixon LE, Riaz A, Martin W, Ryan M, Edwards D, Batley J, Raman H, Carter J, Rogers C, Domoney C, Moore G, Harwood W, Nicholson P, Dieters MJ, DeLacy IH, Zhou J, Uauy C, Boden SA, Park RF, Wulff BBH, Hickey LT. Speed breeding is a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding. Nat Plants. 2018 Jan;4(1):23-29. doi: 10.1038/s41477-017-0083-8.

Ghosh S, Watson A, Gonzalez-Navarro OE, Ramirez-Gonzalez RH, Yanes L, Mendoza-Suárez M, Simmonds J, Wells R, Rayner T, Green P, Hafeez A, Hayta S, Melton RE, Steed A, Sarkar A, Carter J, Perkins L, Lord J, Tester M, Osbourn A, Moscou MJ, Nicholson P, Harwood W, Martin C, Domoney C, Uauy C, Hazard B, Wulff BBH, Hickey LT. Speed breeding in growth chambers and glasshouses for crop breeding and model plant research. Nat Protoc. 2018 Dec;13(12):2944-2963. doi: 10.1038/s41596-018-0072-z.

There has been a lot of interest in the speed breeding technology and in the desktop speed breeding chamber, and the researchers highlighted the work in a piece on BBC Look East. The research is also described in a news article on the John Innes Centre website and through a series of videos.