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. 2022 Dec 14;11(24):3525.
doi: 10.3390/plants11243525.

Variability in Maturity, Oil and Protein Concentration, and Genetic Distinctness among Soybean Accessions Conserved at Plant Gene Resources of Canada

Yong-Bi Fu  1 , Elroy R Cober  2 , Malcolm J Morrison  2 , Frédéric Marsolais  3 , Rong Zhou  4 , Ning Xu  4 , A Claire Gahagan  2 , Carolee Horbach  1
Affiliations

Variability in Maturity, Oil and Protein Concentration, and Genetic Distinctness among Soybean Accessions Conserved at Plant Gene Resources of Canada

Yong-Bi Fu et al. Plants (Basel). .

Abstract

Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) is one of the important crops in Canada and has the potential to expand its production further north into the Canadian Prairies. Such expansion, however, requires the search for adapted soybean germplasm useful for the development of productive cultivars with earlier maturity and increased protein concentration. We initiated several research activities to characterize 848 accessions of the soybean collection conserved at Plant Gene Resources of Canada (PGRC) for maturity, oil and protein concentration, and genetic distinctness. The characterization revealed a wide range of variations present in each assessed trait among the PGRC soybean accessions. The trait variabilities allowed for the identification of four core subsets of 35 PGRC soybean accessions, each specifically targeted for early maturity for growing in Saskatoon and Ottawa, and for high oil and protein concentration. The two early maturity core subsets for Saskatoon and Ottawa displayed days to maturity ranging from 103 to 126 days and 94 to 102 days, respectively. The two core subsets for high oil and protein concentration showed the highest oil and protein concentration from 25.0 to 22.7% and from 52.8 to 46.7%, respectively. However, these core subsets did not differ significantly in genetic distinctness (as measured with 19,898 SNP markers across 20 soybean chromosomes) from the whole PGRC soybean collection. These findings are useful, particularly for the management and utilization of the conserved soybean germplasm.

Keywords: core subset; genetic diversity; maturity; oil and protein concentration; plant germplasm conservation; soybean germplasm.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The distribution of observed values for the assayed soybean accessions in maturity, oil and protein concentration, and genetic distinctness. Panels (A,B) show the variabilities of soybean maturity observed in Saskatoon and Ottawa in 2018, respectively. Panels (C,D) illustrate the distributions of oil and protein concentration, respectively. Panel (E) displays the variability of genetic distinctness measured with average pairwise dissimilarity.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Four significant trait correlations detected among maturity, oil and protein concentration, and genetic distinctness of the assayed soybean accessions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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