Abstract
Soybean is an important oilseed crop which supplies both industrial processes and animal feed as well as having a number of food uses. The high yields of oil from soybean seed, along with large planting acreage, significant production infrastructure, and its capacity to fix nitrogen, make it the second most valuable crop in the USA and fourth in the world. In this review, we discuss the current understanding of the genetics of fatty acid biosynthesis in plants, based on soybean and other species. We describe recent biotechnological approaches to improve or alter oil content and oil profile in soybean. We provide a list of the presently understood genetic variants, both natural and induced by mutagenesis, in the known soybean fatty acid biosynthesis genes, including four mutations not previously described. We discuss the implications of the increasing amount of genomic data available for composition improvement, using the known fatty acid biosynthesis genes as a case study, and describe potentially new oil gene mutants based on genome sequence data.
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The authors are grateful to M. Carrero-Colón for technical assistance.
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This work is/was supported in part by USDA Agricultural Research Service and by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch project 1011542.
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KAH analyzed the composition data, made figures, and wrote the manuscript. MEH analyzed the polymorphism data and edited the manuscript.
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Hudson, K.A., Hudson, M.E. Genetic Variation for Seed Oil Biosynthesis in Soybean. Plant Mol Biol Rep 39, 700–709 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11105-020-01276-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11105-020-01276-1