A Doubled Haploid Facility at the Iowa State University  was recently inaugurated by Thomas Lübberstedt, associate professor and K.J. Frey chair in agronomy and director of the R.F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding. It offers the technological expertise and laboratory facilities to produce pure, inbred corn lines in less time than traditional methods. 

This Facility will allow the development of pure, inbred lines in only two generations, which generally takes five to eight years. "With the doubled haploid process, you start from the same place (breeding two different lines), but by a biological trick, the offspring do not contain two genomes as usual, but only one. Then you have a chemical treatment, and after that, plants have two identical genomes, so you can get to the inbred lines much faster," said Lübberstedt. 

The facility is open to public and private groups from ISU, to researchers from inside and outside the United States, and to those interested in generating doubled haploids of crops other than corn. 

The news release can be viewed at
http://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2010/apr/doubledhaploid.