Advancements and challenges in bamboo breeding for sustainable development.

This article provides a comprehensive review of bamboo breeding technologies, tracing their development through four eras—selective breeding, traditional breeding, molecular breeding, and design breeding—and emphasizing their role in enhancing bamboo as a sustainable, renewable resource. It highlights the challenges posed by bamboo's long vegetative growth and irregular flowering, which complicate breeding efforts, and details advances in genetic engineering methods such as Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, plant virus vectors, gene gun, polyethylene glycol (PEG)-mediated transformation, and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. The review underscores the importance of improving traits like fiber length, internode length, wall thickness, and lignin and cellulose content to meet growing demands for bamboo in papermaking, plastic substitution, construction, and other industries. It also identifies future priorities including expanding genomic resources, developing universal breeding technologies applicable across diverse bamboo species, and integrating omics and artificial intelligence to accelerate breeding for environmental adaptability and material quality, thereby supporting sustainable development and the global bamboo industry.