Improving Seed Quality of Soybean Suitable for Growing in Europe

Abstract

The potential of soybean for food, feed, and pharmaceutical industry arises from the composition of its seed. Since European countries import 95% of the annual demand for soybean grains, meal, and oil, causing an enormous trade deficit, the governments in Europe had started to introduce additional incentives to stimulate soybean cropping. To rebalance the sources of soybean supply in the future, production must be followed by continuous research to create varieties that would make European soybean more appealing to the processing industry and profitable enough to satisfy European farmers. This chapter is giving an overview of the European soybean seed quality research and an insight into soybean seed quality progress made at the Agricultural Institute Osijek, Croatia. The studies presented are mainly considering maturity groups suitable for growing in almost all European regions. The most important traits of soybean seed quality discussed are protein content and amino acid composition, oil content and fatty acid composition, soluble sugars, and isoflavones. Defining quality traits facilitates the parental selection in breeding programs aiming to improve the added value properties of final soybean products and enables the exchange of materials between different breeding and research institutions to introduce diversity, which is a prerequisite for genetic advance.

Soybean Production, Versatility, and Improvement

“…Soybean seed has many beneficial traits, such as high protein, oil, and soluble sugar content [135]. While soybean seed value is defined by these favorable qualities, past and present breeding attempts have sought further improvement.…”

“…While soybean seed value is defined by these favorable qualities, past and present breeding attempts have sought further improvement. With regards to protein content, breeders have worked with soybean to increase total protein content as well as the amount of sulfur containing amino acids, methionine and cysteine [135]. Methionine and cysteine are of interest since the seed protein is naturally deficient, and these two amino acids can improve the nutritional value of soybean meal [135,136].…”

“…With regards to protein content, breeders have worked with soybean to increase total protein content as well as the amount of sulfur containing amino acids, methionine and cysteine [135]. Methionine and cysteine are of interest since the seed protein is naturally deficient, and these two amino acids can improve the nutritional value of soybean meal [135,136]. However, some research indicates that total protein content is negatively correlated with other favorable seed qualities, including yield, oil content, and potentially methionine and cysteine content [137,138].…”

“…There have been breeding attempts mainly to increase oleic acid in soybean seed while keeping linolenic acid relatively low, due to respective human health impacts [141,142]. Lastly, soluble sugar levels, specifically sucrose content, has also been an area of interest in soybean breeding [135]. While sucrose is the main sugar found in soybean, fructose and glucose are also present but in trace amounts [143].…”

Correlation and path analysis for agronomic traits contributing to yield in 30 genotypes of soybean

“…One of the efforts to increase soybean production is by creating high production soybean varieties obtained through plant breeding programs Sudarić et al 2019;Sulistyo and Sari 2018). An important step in plant breeding is the selection phase (Meira et al 2016;Weltzien and Christinck 2017;Sulistyo and Sari 2018).…”