A team of international researchers, including from the University of Western Australia and the CSIRO, have developed a new technique that enables up to eight generations of wheat and nine generations of barley to grow per year.

Many plant breeding projects - such as those aiming to increase food production - depend on getting ‘pure lines' of plants but this can take a lot of time as, up until now, it depended on self-pollination for several generations.

Until recently, the fastest way to obtain ‘pure lines' was to exploit differences in latitude or altitude, such as the ‘shuttle breeding' technique developed by the ‘Father of the Green Revolution', Nobel Laureate late Dr Norman Borlaug. However, even this technique - which involves growing plants at different places -achieved only two or three generations a year.

The team developed a method of embryo culture, whereby the stunning results where achieved by combining specially modified water, light, temperature, humidity and potting-mix management with the plant embryo.

Co-author, Associate Professor Guijun Yan, from UWA's School of Plant Biology and Institute of Agriculture, said a skilled technician in the team was able to dissect 60 plant embryos per hour from the developing grains.

"By dramatically shortening times required to obtain pure-line plant genotypes, our method could have wide applications in breeding and biological studies," Associate Professor Yan said.