Deciphering soybean molecular stress response via high-throughput approach

Abstract

As a result of thousands years of agriculture humans created many crop varieties, which became the basis of our daily diet, animal feed and also industrial application. Soybean is one of the most important crops worldwide and because of its high economic value, the demand for soybean products is constantly growing. On the European continent, due to unfavorable climate conditions, soybean cultivation is restricted and we are forced to rely on imported plant material. The development of agriculture requires continuous improvements in quality and yield of crop varieties to changing or adverse conditions, namely stresses. To achieve this goal we need to recognize and understand molecular dependencies underlying plant stress responses. With the advent of new technologies in studies of plant transcriptomes and proteomes, now we have tools to fast and more precisely elucidate of desirable crop traits. Here we present an overview of high-throughput techniques used to analyze soybean’s responses to different abiotic (drought, flooding, cold stress, salinity, phosphate deficiency) and biotic (infection of F. oxysporum, cyst nematode, SMV) stress conditions on the level of transcriptome (mRNAs and miRNAs) and proteome.