Genomic Analysis Of Introgressions In Crop Legumes: Soybean and Common Bean

With the availability of reference genomes for many crops and the ease of re-sequencing accessions, we can now analyze at introgressions a level of detail not previously available.  Using the Phaseolus vulgarism (common bean) reference genome, we uncovered introgressions in pooled resequencing data of accessions from across the range of domestication of common bean.  In this instance, the introgression was unexpected and confounded the analyses that were being undertaken to look at adaptive sweeps across the genome.  In soybean (G. max), we are intentionally making introgressions with the undomesticated ancestor (G. soma) to look for potentially valuable genes/alleles that can be moved into adapted backgrounds.  Next generation sequencing is being used to map and define introgressions in structured populations of crosses between G. soja and G. max.  Both examples exemplify the power of genomics to delineate the extent of introgression of unadapted chromosome segments into adapted germplasm.