Mizzou researcher tries to crack code on soybeans
The soybean. Just a humble legume wrapped in a funny pod.
But the beans are worth a bundle these days - more than $33 billion nationally in 2010, and $2.6 billion in Missouri alone. On Friday, American soybean exporters, in fact, sold more than 2.9 million metric tons to China in the biggest deal of its kind ever, underscoring just how valuable the crop has the potential to be.
University of Missouri researcher, Henry Nguyen, believes there’s even more potential for the soybean, if only scientists can unravel the molecular keys to greater yield, better disease resistance, higher nutrition and oil content.
This week Nguyen announced a project to sequence the genome of 1,008 commercially important soybean varieties, an effort he hopes will give farmers and researchers a road map to better beans - and make Missouri an epicenter of soybean research in the process.
“If we get something like this going, it’s definitely good for the scientific reputation of the state, and the economic development that comes with that,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen, who heads the MU-based National Center for Soybean Biotechnology, pointed to the fact that the major soy-oriented trade groups are based in the St. Louis area, along with major research institutions and private corporations with a stake in soybean science.
“St. Louis is a powerhouse - with the United Soybean Board, the American Soybean Association, the Danforth Center, Monsanto, Washington University. In Columbia, there’s the University of Missouri,” he added. “This will definitely bring in good science, and that usually attracts industry and scientific manpower into the state.”
For soybean growers, the project comes as happy news.
“We’ve made good progress in the last number of years, but this is another step,” said Steve Censky, CEO of the American Soybean Association. “We’ll be able to identify where on the soybean genome is the trait responsible for drought tolerance, or the oil profile, or the protein content. It adds to the information we have, and really speeds up the ability to improve the soybean.”
In recent years, international groups have formed to study the world’s major commodity crops. But, Nguyen said, there is no such group for the soybean, despite the fact that world consumption has been growing steadily for the past decade.
“We don’t have an international center that has the global mandate for soybean improvement,” he said. “So I said, We here at the University of Missouri, we have the obligation - we have to do something to enhance soybean science and also the genetic improvements that will give U.S. producers a competitive advantage.”
Nguyen picked the number, 1,008, as a goal because the number “8″ is considered auspicious and a harbinger of prosperity in China, where the bean likely originated. But actually his target number is considerably higher: 3,000 or more varieties.
The first plant genome to be sequenced, or mapped, was a weed in the mustard family, Arabidopsis, which has a relatively low number of base pairs, with about 140 million. (The number of base pairs indicates the size of a genome and its complexity.) In subsequent years, other plants - and increasingly valuable ones - were sequenced, including rice, with about 450 million base pairs, and corn, with about 2 billion. As sequencing technologies have improved, the process has gotten even faster and easier, making it possible to sequence more complex genomes.
“Just over the last two years, its unbelievable - there have been revolutionary changes in sequencing technology,” Nguyen said, noting that the first soybean sequencing, launched in 2002, was completed in 2008.
Nguyen says he believes his researcher group will be able to complete 1,008 sequences in about a year. Once the sequencing is complete, the hope is that scientists will be able to identify what genes, in what combinations, control the traits of a plant. With that information, researchers will be able to breed better plants, faster.
“We’ll know about the genes - where they are, how they operate, which genes to put together,” said Grover Shannon, an MU professor of soybean breeding. “We’ll be able to get better varieties much quicker. We’ll know how to manipulate things.”
The information, Shannon pointed out, will be in the public domain, which is critical to the improvement of research.
“There’s not going to be one private entity, holding all the cards, all the information,” he said. “It’s going to help everybody. I think the next 10 years are going to be really exciting.”
Filed under: money, technology by Wolf