Genomic Resources for Trait Discovery and Improved Plant Performances in Soybean

Soybean is an important cash crop with high protein and oil content and widely used as human food and animal feed. Soybean yield improvement is very much essential due to its market value and the major bottleneck is its narrow genetic basis. Key to the success of breeding programs aiming to crop improvement is the extent of genetic variation present in the germplasm. Advanced sequencing and data analysis techniques will greatly improve our ability to dissect and mine genomes for specific genes underlying key traits and allelic variation. We have selected most diverse cultivated and wild type soybean lines from the U.S. germplasm collection for re-sequencing. Sequencing of 600 genomes were completed from the targeted 1500 lines, and others are in progress.  Development of additional reference genomes of selected soybean germplasm is in progress and this information also will be a significant resource for the trait discovery processes. Current knowledge of the genetic diversity, genome structure and evolution, and genome-wide association study of major traits including salinity tolerance for the discovery of novel alleles will be presented. Genotype-phenotype association studies will be highly impacted by the large scale genome resequencing and next generation mapping, and this will help designing genomics-assisted breeding strategies for the development of soybeans with improved plant performances and better yield.