Genomic research on soybean and its impact on molecular breeding

Soybean, with its high protein and oil contents as well as nitrogen-fixing ability, is an important component in climate-smart agriculture. Yet, to meet the demands on production and consumption, it is necessary to continue to improve its agronomic traits related to yield, adaptability, and nutritional values. Benefiting from advances in genome sequencing technologies, soybean research has blossomed in the past decade since the release of the first soybean reference genome. Improvements in the quality of soybean reference genomes in recent years have facilitated ever higher levels of soybean research. New features such as open chromatin regions and long non-coding RNAs in the soybean genome have also been revealed. To take advantage of the genetic diversity inherent in the soybean germplasm collections, genotyping-by-sequencing, high-resolution mapping, and subsequent gene functional analyses are now routine processes to precisely identify functional markers and genes for molecular breeding. Molecular breeding techniques allow the efficient stacking or modification of desirable genes, and greatly improve the rate and precision of generating new soybean varieties. In this chapter, a brief summary will be given on the current progress in soybean genomic research and its impact on soybean molecular breeding.