Molecular Design Breeding Enables "Customized" Production of Soybeans

In recent years, the Key Laboratory of Soybean Molecular Design and Breeding of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made a series of achievements in the exploration of environment-friendly soybean molecular design and breeding and the exploration of important agronomic traits of soybean such as high yield, high quality, efficient nutrient utilization, and disease resistance

Through the advanced soybean molecular design and breeding platform, new environmentally friendly soybean varieties have been cultivated, providing excellent new varieties for improving the planting structure of black soil crops in Northeast China and reducing weight and medicine

Statistics from China Customs show that China's cumulative soybean imports in 2020 exceeded 100 million tons for the first time, an increase of 11.

Based on domestic production, increasing domestic soybean production and gradually reducing over-reliance on imported soybeans will help alleviate the structural shortage of domestic food and better ensure national food security

This requires researchers to continue to tackle key problems, breed more high-yield and stable-yielding high-quality varieties, continue to increase soybean production on limited land, and ensure the domestic supply of edible soybean products

"From the perspective of the current status and development history of domestic and foreign elite varieties, molecular design breeding represents the future direction.

In Feng Xianzhong's view, the core of molecular design breeding is to genetically reshape seed traits on the basis of the whole genome

The gene responsible for fertility was found from 60,000 soybean genes, and genetic control and improvement were carried out, resulting in a new soybean variety that changed the mature growth period

In addition, the research team has also developed intelligent automatic acquisition technology of soybean plant type, quantitative analysis technology of soybean leaf shape, quantitative analysis technology of soybean pod number traits, and seed morphology analysis and automatic acquisition technology, realizing the quantitative analysis and comparison of important agronomic traits of soybean

In view of the narrow genetic foundation of soybean breeding and the lack of excellent germplasm resources, Feng Xianzhong's team used the core soybean backbone parents as materials, and used physical and chemical mutagenesis methods to create a soybean mutant population with a capacity of 400,000 lines, and established soybean Saturated gene mutation library and excellent mutation material library

Feng Xianzhong said: "We have detected more than 8 million new soybean genome variants, and more than 98% of soybean genes have an average of more than 3 missense alleles.

On this basis, the research team cloned and identified 56 important genes regulating soybean high yield, high quality, stress resistance and growth period, selected 778 excellent breeding materials, and selected excellent materials and target genes for the cultivation of new soybean varieties

"Molecular design breeding technology is our advantage, which gives us confidence and determination to serve major national strategies

　　(Xin Yu)

"China Food News" (Version 04, June 23, 2021)

(Editor in charge: Wang Jinchen)