From the field to the plant factory! Chinese scientists have proposed a new approach to crop breeding.

Recently, the team led by Yang Qichang at the Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in collaboration with the Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Institute of Modern Agriculture at Peking University, and Shenzhen BGI Wuvu Technology Co., Ltd., among others, has introduced a groundbreaking new approach to crop breeding: the plant breeding factory. The related research findings have been published in the international journal “Molecular Plant”.

To address the longstanding challenges of lengthy breeding cycles and low efficiency in traditional methods, the paper proposes relocating time-consuming breeding stages indoors, where they can be rapidly iterated under the precisely controlled conditions of a plant‑factory breeding accelerator. By integrating molecular design breeding and phenotypic modeling predictions, this approach enables a complete seed-to-seed cycle within the facility, breaking free from reliance on natural environmental conditions and dramatically shortening the development timeline for new varieties.

The article outlines five stages in the evolution of the breeding factory:

Version 1.0: achieving only early flowering;

Version 2.0: significantly reducing the entire growth period;

Version 3.0: incorporating environmental omics to screen for environmentally adaptive genes across various combinations of temperature, light, water, and other parameters, followed by field validation;

Version 4.0: merging big data and AI to integrate genotypic, phenotypic, and environmental data into predictive models, enabling “design‑based breeding”;

Version 5.0: a theoretical vision that envisions synthetic cultivation of crops entirely within the factory, fundamentally redefining the conventional field‑based paradigm.

For many years, Yang Qichang’s team at the Institute of Urban Agriculture has pursued continuous innovation in the creation and application of plant breeding factories, developing advanced technologies for coupling environmental and nutritional regulation in rapid crop propagation. They have also established methods for in situ, real-time phenotyping of crops within the accelerator environment, along with dynamic trait prediction models, enabling cross‑environmental forecasting of crop traits. By overcoming key technical hurdles in integrating “rapid propagation” with “precision selection,” they have endowed the plant breeding factory with core capabilities characteristic of Version 4.0, providing crucial support for advancing China’s agricultural biotechnology sector.

This research was supported by projects under the National Key R&D Program and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ Science and Technology Innovation Project.

Link to the paper:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2026.07.017

Source: Institute of Urban Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences