Characterizing the impact of an exotic soybean line on elite cultivar development

Abstract

The genetic diversity of North American soybean cultivars has been largely influenced by a small number of ancestors. High yielding breeding lines that possess exotic pedigrees have been developed, but identifying beneficial exotic alleles has been difficult as a result of complex interactions of yield alleles with genetic backgrounds and environments as well as the highly quantitative nature of yield. PI 416937 has been utilized in the development of many high yielding lines that have been entered into the USDA Southern States Uniform Tests over the past~20 years. The primary goal of this research was to identify genomic regions under breeding selection from PI 416937 and introduce a methodology for identifying and potentially utilizing beneficial diversity from lines prevalent in the ancestry of elite cultivars. Utilizing SoySNP50K Infinium BeadChips, 52 high yielding PI 416937-derived lines as well as their parents were genotyped to identify PI 416937 alleles under breeding selection. Nine genomic regions across three chromosomes and 17 genomic regions across seven chromosomes were identified where PI 416937 alleles were under positive or negative selection. Minimal significant associations between PI 416937 alleles and yield were observed in replicated yield trials of five RIL populations, highlighting the difficulty of consistently detecting yield associations.

Quantitative trait loci underlying flooding tolerance in soybean (Glycine max)

“…However, it was mapped in a very small population consisting of 60 RILs, and the results might need to be confirmed with a larger population. PI 416937, one of the parents for the RIL population in this study, is a maturity group V soybean accession from Kanagawa, Japan, and is present in the pedigrees of many cultivars in the Southeastern USA (Stewart-Brown et al, 2020). The accession is reported to possess many unique traits, including aluminium tolerance (Villagarcia et al, 2001), physiologically controlled drought stress-related traits (Sloane et al, 1990), proliferous fibrous roots (Abdel-Haleem et al, 2011;Pantalone et al, 1996) and slow canopy wilting (King et al, 2009).…”