Reverse breeding is a technique used to produce hybrids much faster and in much higher numbers compared to conventional plant breeding techniques.
In reverse breeding, an individual heterozygous plant is chosen for its elite quality and, subsequently, homozygous parental lines are derived from this plant, which upon crossing, can reconstitute the original genetic composition of the selected heterozygous plant from which the lines were derived.
During reverse breeding, a genetic modification step is employed to suppress recombination during meiosis, through RNAi -mediated down-regulation of genes involved in the meiotic recombination process.
Аднак, the final heterozygous plants do not contain any foreign DNA.