Plant improvement has shifted its focus from yield, quality and disease resistance to factors that will enhance commercial export, such as early maturity, shelf life and better processing quality. Conventional plant breeding methods aiming at the improvement of a self-pollinating crop, such as wheat, usually take 10-12 years to develop and release of the new variety. During the past 10 years, significant advances have been made and accelerated methods have been developed for precision breeding and early release of crop varieties. 
This work summarizes concepts dealing with germplasm enhancement and development of improved varieties based on innovative methodologies that include doubled haploidy, marker assisted selection, marker assisted background selection, genetic mapping, genomic selection, high-throughput genotyping, high-throughput phenotyping, mutation breeding, reverse breeding, transgenic breeding, shuttle breeding, speed breeding, low cost high-throughput field phenotyping, etc.  It is an important reference with special focus on accelerated development of improved crop varieties.

Dr. Satbir Singh Gosal is a former Director at the School of Agricultural Biotechnology, and former Director of Research at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India. He was an Honorary Member of the Board of Assessors (Australian Research Council, Canberra), Biotechnology Career Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, USA, and President of the Punjab Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 200 research papers in refereed journals and 35 book chapters. He has co-authored one textbook and co-edited 6 Books with Springer.

Dr. Shabir Hussain Wani received his PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding from Punjab Agricultural University. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and edited 16 books on plant stress physiology, including 10 with Springer. He served as a Review Editor for Frontiers in Plant Science from 2015 to 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops of the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural, Sciences and Technology of Kashmir in India.