Current perspectives on improving soybean performance on saline-alkaline lands

Soil salinity is an increasing threat to global food security and environmental sustainability. Soybean, the leading dietary protein and oil content crop in animal feed, also provides humans with 30% of their dietary fat intake and contributes to 67% of global protein powder consumption annually. The improvement and utilization of saline-alkaline land can expand arable land for soybean production and decrease the yield penalty, ensuring food security for the growing world population. Over the past decades, identifying salt-tolerant cultivars and understanding salt stress signaling and responses in soybeans have made some progress. However, few successful studies about improved soybean field performance have been reported. Here, we provide recent advances in functionally characterized genes and major quantitative trait loci (QTLs) contributing to soybean salt tolerance. We focus on the strategies that we could take to achieve salt-tolerant soybean cultivars with high-yield, which includes unveiling the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the soybean response to high pH alkaline stress, to gain better knowledge of the soybean circadian clock and time-gate the response to saline-alkaline stress and minimize the fitness cost, and lay out the audacious plans to make soybean a halophyte. We aim to inspire the researchers in salt-tolerant breeding and research to new frontiers.