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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Columbia, Missouri » Plant Genetics Research » Research » Research Project #447517

Research Project: Utilizing Genes from the Soybean Germplasm Collection to Mitigate Drought Stress – Phase II

Location: Plant Genetics Research

Project Number: 5070-21000-044-035-R
Project Type: Reimbursable Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Oct 1, 2024
End Date: Sep 30, 2025

Objective:
Drought is the single greatest cause of soybean yield loss, and the incidence and severity of drought is expected to increase in coming decades. A more sustainable solution than irrigation is to identify and deploy adapted soybean cultivars that are more tolerant of water limitation. Breeding efforts generally focus on repeated crossing between elite lines – essentially failing to take advantage of the vast genetic diversity in the soybean USDA-GRIN germplasm collection. We have taken key steps to leverage this diversity, via multi-location and drought stress genetic experiments that identified maturity group (MG) 4 Plant Introductions (PIs) with positive drought–associated traits: lower Canopy Wilting (CW), higher Water Use Efficiency (WUE), higher Nitrogen Derived From the Atmosphere (NDFA, as a measure of nitrogen fixation), and lower Canopy Temperatures (CT). Our experiments leveraged prior investment by the funding organization in obtaining marker data for >19,000 accessions in the USDA germplasm collection. These efforts have paid off, and we have already reported several hundred genetic marker associations with our drought tolerance traits. We are actively applying genomic selection and have crossed PIs with these favorable traits with an elite public parental line and are developing multiple breeding populations containing the best possible alleles for multiple drought-associated traits. Germplasm releases will serve to broaden the genetic base and deploy drought alleles in improved soybean genotypes that will provide valuable tools to commercial and public breeders and producers to meet the substantial challenges of increased incidence and severity of drought stress.

Approach:
Our previous research with Plant Introduction lines with favorable drought associated traits crossed to an elite public parental line resulted in creation of multiple breeding populations containing the best possible alleles for multiple drought-associated traits. We also intercrossed among our populations to generate uniquely valuable Multi-parent Advanced Generation InterCross (MAGIC) populations specific for drought traits. We have both basic scientific and applied objectives for this proposal. Basic research objectives include analysis of a MAGIC population to identify genomic locations (and ideally genes) associated with four drought tolerance traits. We intend to identify and release soybean germplasm which will serve to broaden the genetic base and deploy drought alleles in improved soybean genotypes. We have four interconnected approaches to achieve the objectives of this project: 1. Confirm drought-tolerance traits and seed yield for the most promising MAGIC derived selections (G1F4:5) in multi-location trials. 2. Perform a second year of multi-location studies with a large, previously genotyped MAGIC population for four drought- associated traits. 3. Develop genomic-based prediction models to efficiently identify novel drought-tolerant genotypes and to genomic regions and/or candidate genes associated with various drought tolerance metrics. 4. Use a cropping systems model to quantify and understand yield changes as a result of altered drought-associated traits in the context of year-to-year weather variability and climate change.