Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
size of soybean enables large quantities of tissue to be harvested for
transcriptomic, metabolomic and proteomic studies. It also makes soybean
ideal for most nodule, root, shoot seed and embryo investigations, in addition
to grafting (
e.g.
, Delves
et al
., 1986; Reid
et al
. 2011) and xylem sap analysis
experiments (
e.g.
, Djordjevic
et al
., 2007). Soybean can also be used in
Agrobacterium rhizogenes
-mediated transformation studies for gene
overexpression and RNA interference (
e.g.
, Hayashi
et al
., 2008; Reid
et al
.
2011; Lin
et al
. 2011a). Functional genomics approaches, such as Virus-
Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS), are also well established for soybean (
e.g.
,
Zhang and Ghabrial, 2006). VIGS is currently proving to be an instrumental
reverse genetics tool to identify the role of a target gene in soybean growth and
development. Moreover, soybean has a very large germplasm including robust
mutant (
e.g.
, Carroll
et al
., 1985) and TILLING populations (
e.g.
, Cooper
et
al
. 2008; PM Gresshoff and J Batley, unpublished).
Collectively, the intensive genetic and genomic studies using soybean
have been aimed at better understanding the genetic background and
agronomic traits of this multibillion dollar crop. The goal is to assist in the
establishment of elite cultivars that will contribute to sustainable farming
practices. For legumes, integrating central regulators of nodulation will be
essential for any such targeted crop improvement and would include legume
varieties used as food, fuel and feed stocks. Indeed, findings can be transferred
via comparative genomic approaches to benefit the cultivation and production
of numerous legume crop species (Cannon
et al
. 2009; Ferguson and
Gresshoff 2009; Rispail
et al
. 2010). Thus, findings using soybean could
potentially underpin advances in the agricultural management of the important
legume-rhizobia symbiosis. This would lead to an improvement in nitrogen
use efficiency and to a reduced reliance on our current use of expensive and
often polluting nitrogen-based fertilizers.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Prof. Peter M. Gresshoff for his helpful
discussions and kindly advice. The Australian Research Council and the
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume
Research are thanked for financial assistance.
