Public and private researchers continue to find ways to play off each other’s strengths to develop the best soybean varieties.  While private companies almost exclusively focus on developing GMO varieties, Illinois university researchers work on developing conventional, niche market varieties and basic research using new technologies that can deliver results more efficiently.

“The public sector continues to play a role in variety development.  We are releasing varieties for non-GMO markets and also developing germplasm with an emphasis on new diversity from the soybean germplasm collection,” says Brian Diers, plant breeder, University of Illinois.  “We interact with other disciplines to improve our understanding of economic traits and to educate future plant breeders and agricultural professionals.  There is currently a severe shortage of plant breeders, and we are working to educate these new scientists.”

All totaled, the University of Illinois released five varieties in 2009 that were all soybean cyst nematode (SCN) resistant.  Two were soybean aphid resistant and four were conventional varieties.  In 2010, five more varieties were released.  All were SCN resistant, three were aphid resistant and three were non-GMO.  The lines were released for commercial company branding.

Soybean aphid resistance offers a good model of how the public-private partnership works.  Glen Hartman, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plant pathologist at the University of Illinois, and Curt Hill, a research specialist, spearheaded research to identify sources of aphid resistance.  Hartman, Diers and others then utilized genomics resource tools to map genes controlling aphid resistance and released to farmers varieties with aphid resistance.  The resistance also was licensed to the private sector by the University of Illinois. Private company varieties will soon be on the market.

“This is one example of how we can apply genetic tools to develop pest or disease resistance.  Every disease is unique, as each has different sources of resistance and genetic control of resistance.  But our hope is that we can understand the genetic basis of the resistance and develop resistant varieties much quicker with the new genetic tools that are available to researchers,” Diers says.  ”Many of these tools have been developed through funding from the soybean checkoff.”

One major tool researchers now have is the genetic sequence. “The DNA sequence of the variety, Williams 82, was recently completed by the U.S. Department of Energy,” Diers says.  “Sequencing provides base pairs of DNA so we can much more quickly identify gene location.”

Another tool the research community will soon have is data from 50,000 genetic markers on each of the 19,000 accessions in the USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) soybean germplasm collection. The collection is housed at the University of Illinois, and the marker work, partly funded by the checkoff, will be done by researchers at the USDA-ARS Beltsville, Md., facility.

“Screening the collection with the markers will give us an understanding of the collection’s diversity and help breeders use it more efficiently in identifying useful genes,” he says. “However, identification of the effects of genes requires studying phenotypic traits of accessions in the collection (disease resistance, pest resistance, composition).  Breeders are ideally suited for such high throughput phenotyping, especially for economic traits.  The combined efforts of  breeders and molecular biologists will be productive and help speed up the breeding process.”

-Funded through the Soybean Checkoff