A targeted 'off switch' in a plant's egg cell speeds up the breeding process‎

An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has succeeded in generating haploids in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana very efficiently. This process involves degrading a specific protein in the centromere. The study's findings, published in the journal Plant Communications, could in principle also be applied to crop plants, significantly speeding up breeding processes.