A Resource for Functional Genomics to Support Soybean Genetics and Breeding

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PI: Peter LaFayette (University of Georgia)coPIs: Robert Stupar (University of Minnesota), Minviluz Stacey (University of Missouri), Thomas E. Clemente (University of Nebraska), and C. Nathan Hancock (University of South Carolina - Aiken)Soybeans provide the single greatest source of vegetable protein and oil worldwide, and uses of this important crop now range from human food to alternatives for petroleum-derived chemicals. The goal of this project is to create molecular tools to make it easy for geneticists and breeders to identify and study the function of genes associated with desirable agronomic traits. The project will provide laboratory and field research opportunities for postdoctoral fellows and undergraduate students, including students from a predominantly undergraduate institution. In addition, yearly workshops will bring together soybean researchers from across the nation to participate in hands-on training in precision genomics and in screening plant populations to identify new traits of interest. The resources developed by this project will advance soybean improvement, which in turn can lead to designer oils and proteins for healthier diets, industrial compounds, and biodiesel to meet a growing global demand.This research will add to the current set of forward and reverse genetics resources available to the plant research community. A key activity will be to develop and characterize the publicly available soybean fast neutron (FN) mutagenesis population with a goal of attaining a biologically relevant amount of genomic coverage. Concurrently, individual genes within FN deleted regions that alter traits of importance to the soybean community (e.g., yield, oil, protein, stress tolerance, and nitrogen fixation) will be mutated using CRISPER/Cas9 technology to pinpoint the genes responsible for specific phenotypes. In addition, a set of complementary, transposon-based mutagenesis populations will be made to specifically tailor gene discovery for the highly duplicated genome of soybean. TheTnt1 insertional mutagenesis population will result in traditional loss-of-function phenotypes, the Ac/Ds activation tagging population will cause gene mis-expression, and the mPing transposon will be used for both gene silencing and overexpression. These strategies are expected to result in recovery of novel phenotypes not previously observed in soybean. Data, phenotypes, seeds and other information will be available via the project website at http://soymutants.uga.edu and at SoyBase.org.