Thomas Nakel

Speed Robo Breed

Robot assisted high speed breeding

Climate change requires crops that deliver high yields under extreme weather conditions. This makes it necessary to develop accelerated breeding methods that produce new varieties in a shorter time.

The aim of the collaborative project with the Bock Bio Science is to use tissue culture and automation to develop a package of methods that will enable rapid generation cycles for breeding in artificial culture systems and, in the future, the reliable detection of three-parent hybrids. To this end, we will develop the basis for building a versatile platform for accelerated, automated breeding of three-parent plants on the crop Solanum tuberosum (potato). New culture and polyploidization methods as well as the programming of adaptive image recognition algorithms will be developed in the project.