ABSTRACT
Many plant breeding programmes include a phase of inbreeding to make recombined material homozygous before selecting any new cultivars. For autogamous species, such inbreeding is traditionally obtained via repeated selfing in 5-6 generations. As an alternative to this process, plants with the haploid chromosome number may be produced from heterozygous material followed by chromosome doubling to obtain homozygous lines. Large-scale production of chromosome doubled
haploid plants can save 3-4 generations in most programmes, because completely homozygous lines are obtained in the first generation.
