Enhancing Soybean Nutrition While Increasing Yield

About Soybean Enhancement

Soybeans are a critical component of the American food system and contribute significantly to our protein intake. While many think of soybeans as a source of protein or cooking oil, soybeans are also used for animal feed or in biobased products. To meet growing demands, global soybean breeding and commercial seed development markets have incentivized increasing yields and improving traits such as pest resistance and herbicide tolerance. Current soybean varieties are high-yielding and pest resistance, but the crops protein levels and other quality traits have declined over the past 30 years.

FFAR and the United Soybean Board (USB) are partnering on The Soybean Nutrition Enhancement Project to bring together state of the art technologies and expertise in breeding, genomics, biotechnology, statistical and computer learning, phenomics, physiology, agronomy, food and nutritional sciences and engineering to increase and improve soybean protein and amino acid composition. Project breakthroughs aim to increase economic return to soybean farmers, the U.S. soybean industry and to the entire U.S. economy.

To accomplish these goals, FFAR and USB launched a multimillion-dollar, collaborative, multiyear research agenda.

Funded Grants

• George Graef, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is leading an interdisciplinary team to improve genetic diversity, seed composition and yield of soybeans using highly productive soybean genetic resources, breeding, genomics and biotechnology to identify and understand key genes involved in soybean seed protein composition.
• Rouf Mian, USDA-North Carolina State University, is utilizing genetically diverse soybeans and wild relatives to develop new germplasm varieties with consistently elevated protein and yields comparable to commercial varieties.
• Doug Allen, USDA-Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, is identifying the novel amino acid composition genes in the mutant variety and taking advantage of a new analytical method to create a more nutritious soybean.
• Yong-Qiang An, USDA-Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, is identifying the genes that result in elevated protein and using them in breeding efforts of commercial soybean varieties.
• Dharmendra Mishra, Purdue University, is building infrastructure for small- and medium-scale processing of soy products.
• Joseph Balagtas, Purdue University, is constructing an economic model of the soybean value chain by determining market-wide impacts of different supply or demand shocks, including rapid changes due to innovation.
• Vasit Sagan, St. Louis University, is developing seed composition estimation using high-resolution satellite imagery, offering a cost-effective alternative for using satellite remote sensing to estimate seed quality across numerous farm management zones throughout a season.
• Montserrat Salmeron Cortasa, University of Kentucky, is using UAV – unmanned aerial vehicle – imagery to detect differences in the crop nitrogen status after different practices that affect nitrogen availability, such as cover-cropping, to quantify if there is an economically optimum nitrogen fertilizer input applied during seed growth that increases soybean productivity and seed protein concentration.
• Justin McGrath, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, is developing a nitrogen model suitable for identifying ways to improve soybean seed quality using models derived from literature and verified by field experiments.
• Trupti Joshi, University of Missouri, is creating tools to address complex traits such as seed protein content that will allow the soybean research community to identify and exploit the genes, novel alleles and networks that control the most complex traits.
• Robert Schmitz, University of Georgia, is creating a reference atlas of gene expression and cis-regulatory DNA elements for single cells of soybean from various tissue types, and in response to the most important pathogen of soybeans, using newly developed single cell profiling methods.
• Yong-Qiang An, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, using more than 40 terabytes of data, is developing innovative data mining strategies to discover and validate several important trait genes and new genetic resources.
• Gunvant B. Patil, Texas Tech University, is using gene editing in sucrose biosynthesis genes to increase sucrose content to 10% and reduce raffinose family oligosaccharide (RFO) content to boost soy nutritional value.
• Yong-Qiang An & Dilip Shah, USDA-Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, are generating soybean lines that produce more oil and protein, improve amino acid profiles and reduce trypsin inhibitor activity; and are surveying the gene, genetic and trait networks to identify new genes and strategies to improve seed quality and overall resilient performance of soybean to environmental and climate changes.
• Felix Fritschi, University of Missouri, is characterizing the seed yield, protein concentration, and amino acid makeup of soybean lines overexpressing transporter genes and comparing them with the wild type controls for enhanced soybean yield and meal quality.
• Timothy Durrett, Kansas State University, is developing specialized methods to accurately measure metabolites, enabling study of the synthesis and turnover of amino acids in more detail and targeting of key enzymes.
• Lisa Weaver, Smithbucklin, is driving sponsorship of programs and activities important to soy farmers and researchers, such as annual soybean and agricultural research workshops and symposia.
• Larry Purcell, University of Arkansas, is transferring a trait from two different genetic sources into a high yielding soy variety with glyphosate resistance to serve as controls for work on nitrogen cycles.