Breeding crops in a conventional way demands considerable time, space, inputs for selection, and the subsequent crossing of desirable plants. The duration of the seed-to-seed cycle is one of the crucial bottlenecks in the progress of plant research and breeding. In this context, speed breeding (SB), relying mainly on photoperiod extension, temperature control, and early seed harvest, has the potential to accelerate the rate of plant improvement. Well demonstrated in the case of long-day plants, the SB protocols are being extended to short-day plants to reduce the generation interval time. Flexibility in SB protocols allows them to align and integrate with diverse research purposes including population development, genomic selection, phenotyping, and genomic editing. In this review, we discuss the different SB methodologies and their application to hasten future plant improvement. Though SB has been extensively used in plant phenotyping and the pyramiding of multiple traits for the development of new crop varieties, certain challenges and limitations hamper its widespread application across diverse crops. However, the existing constraints can be resolved by further optimization of the SB protocols for critical food crops and their efficient integration in plant breeding pipelines.

The genera Speiropsis and Xylomyces are anomorph fungi. The taxonomic address for the fungi has been unclear. In this study, observation of morphological traits indicates that they have a unique pattern of mycelia with dark-brown to black colour and thick-walled hyphae. The same culture patterns of certain fungi isolated from freshwater habitats in Thailand were selected from BIOTEC Culture Collection (BCC, Thailand), while more species were added from Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (CBS, Netherlands). These fungi were composed of Jahnula spp. (2-celled ascospores), Brachiosphaera tropicalis (hyaline and 4-5 armed conidia), S. pedatospora (hyaline and branches conidia) and Xylomyces sp. (dematiaceous and fusiform chlamydospores). This study was undertaken to confirm the taxonomic address for S. pedatospora and Xylomyces based on phylogenetics relationships as inferred from their ITS rDNA sequence data by using MP (unweighted and successive weighted MP), NJ, ML and Bayesian analysis. Phylogenic analysis revealed that isolates of S. pedatospora (2 strains) was a member of the Order Jahnulales and clustered with Jahnula spp. (5 strains) and B. tropicalis (4 strains) with >82% bootstrap support and 100% posterior probabilities. Four isolates of X. chlamydosporus, X. elegans and X. aquaticus were shown to be polyphyletic within the Jahnulales and Pleoporales. The MP and NJ showed the same topology as in the Jahnulales clade obtained by ML analysis.

The molecular analysis of 32 durian F1 hybrids, resulted from crossing of the Arp 8990 (female parent) and ‘Otong’ (male parent), was conducted in order to determine the genetic characteristics of hybrids and parents, as it would be followed/evidenced by the variability of traits produced from the cross breeding. The RAPD analyses of 14 primers resulted in 114 scoring bands, 112 (98.2%) of them were polymorphic, with 4 to 11 bands amplified per primer. The electrophoresis gel of the PCR results revealed that some hybrids produced different band patterns compared to the parents; this indicated the crossing between parents’ alleles and trait combinations from both the parents. The Dice-Sorensen similarity coefficient demonstrated that most of the hybrids had distant genetic similarities with both parents, which were ranged from 0.141 [71B(4) and 72B(15)] to 0.776 [71B(15) and 48B(1)]. The UPGMA method was used to construct the dendrogram, which grouped the hybrids in five clusters with distinct genetic relationships and was confirmed with the PCA analysis. This result implied that above crossing produced hybrids having characters different from the parents.

Indonesia is one of the megabiodivesity, which is rich with germplasms including tropical fruit. Snake fruit (Salacca spp.) is a native fruit of Indonesia with a scaly peel and sweet-tart taste. The genetic diversity of 17 accessions of Indonesian snake fruit was resolved using the Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA Polymerase Chain Reaction with 5 primers. The study demonstrated that the samples were grouped in six different clusters with coefficient of similarity ranged from 0.12 to 0.71. The value indicated the wide range of genetic variability among the tested plants. This variability was an important resources for the snake fruit breeding program in developing the consumer's preferred product which by the end supports the plant diversification program.

Prihatini R., Abdullah M.P., Tuan Abdulllah T.A.R., Said I., Hussin H., Mohhamad Saleh N. (2017): Extremely low frequency electromagnetic field generator suitable for plant in vitro studies. Res. Agr. Eng., 63: 180-186.The extremely low frequency electromagnetic field (ELF-EMF) occurs naturally from the earth and artificially as a human invention. The objectives of this study were to develop a suitable ELF-EMF generator for in vitro plants culture studies and to determine the effect of ELF-EMF exposure on in vitro tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) growth and chlorophyll content. An ELF-EMF generator, the coGEM 1,000 was constructed using four coils of copper wires that were connected to a transformer, multimeter and rheostat. The coGEM 1,000 suitable for tissue culture plants is able to produce stable and uniform 6 and 12 mT 50Hz ELF-EMF in the four coils of the ELF-EMF generator. The tobacco in vitro plantlets were exposed to 6 and 12 mT of 50 Hz ELF-EMF for a period of 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 hours. The exposure to 12 mT ELF-EMF for an hour increased plant growth (shoot height); whereas the exposure to 6 mT Elf-EMF for an hour increased chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and the total chlorophyll content.