Towards Breeding 5.0:Smart variety by intelligent breeding
Food security is the most serious challenge for the growing world's population all the time.The world's population for the first time exceeded 2 billion in 1927,reached 8 billion in 2022,and will increase to 9.7 billion in 2050.The current growth rate of food productivity is insufficient to meet the demand for the world population growth.Meanwhile,we are facing new challenges in agriculture,such as global warming,more frequent extreme weather of droughts,floods,extreme low and high temperatures,the continuous growth of population,and the shortage of arable land and fresh water resources,all of which have put forward new requirements for the cultivation of a next generation of agricultural varieties.Due to the speeding advances in basic research in biology and other related disciplines since entering the 20th century,the breeding technologies have undergone rapid development with four generations,including domestication,hybrid breeding,molecular breeding,and breeding by design,all of which have significantly increased worldwide crop yield to ensure food security.However,what is the most featured characteristics of the next generation of breeding?On July 20,2023,Jiayang Li proposed that the intelligent breeding of smart crops should be the core features of the future Breeding 5.0 generation.Here,we introduce the concept of intelligent breeding and the critical targets for smart crops.Smart crops refer to the crops that can smartly respond to environmental changes according to the external environments,so that crops can resist biotic and abiotic stresses at different developmental stages to improve the synergistic optimization between growth and resistance.This requires the understanding of molecular bases of important agronomic traits in crops,which allow us to optimize the dynamic adjustment of plant architecture at different development stages and improve the use efficiencies of agricultural resources.The goal of breeding smart crops is to increase grain production,improve the taste and nutritional quality of food,reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides,and reduce losses from abiotic and biotic stresses,thereby achieving the"two-increases and two-decreases"breeding goals.Intelligent breeding refers to the comprehensive use of the cutting-edge biotechnology and information technology to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of important agronomic traits and the establishment of a large-scale crop information database to achieve accurate prediction of crop phenotypes,which will greatly improve the breeding efficiency and achieve the goal of cultivating smart crops.The successful development of Breeding 5.0 depends on AI-powered biotechnologies on the basis of integrating the breeding technologies of the previous generations,thus to cultivate the next generation of elite new varieties to ensure world food security.
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