Creating high yield, protein with soybean gene

Soybean meal—what’s left over after the soybean seed is crushed and the oil is extracted—contains high-quality protein. Globally, close to 98% of soybean meal produced is used in animal feed. But it has proved difficult to develop soybean varieties with both high protein levels and high yields. A study published in Crop Science suggests that it might be possible to breed soybeans with higher protein concentration without significantly decreasing yields.

The researchers tested a gene that increases protein by breeding it into two different varieties of soybean. The gene is located on chromosome 15, which was previously shown to impact protein concentration. “But there hasn’t been research conducted on how this gene impacts agronomic traits, like yield,” said Brian Diers, plant breeder and a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The researchers developed experimental lines with and without the high protein gene by breeding the gene into two varieties of soybean and testing the lines for both protein concentration and yield. Plants of both varieties with the high protein gene had increased protein concentration and did not show a significant decrease in yields. In fact, the gene increased protein concentration 8–14 g/kg of soybean.

Diers is cautious about the non-significant yield reductions observed in the study. “We did observe a negative yield trend, but it was not statistically significant,” he said. He is now working on generating a more detailed map of chromosome 15, which could help breeders generate other high-protein varieties of soybean.

Abstract