| Soybean is an economically important crop in large portions of the world. Incorporation of soybean in to the food system in many direct and indirect ways has vastly increased the nutritional quality of low cost and plant-based diets. Therefore an enormous amount of effort has gone into increasing the yield and nutritional quality of soybeans through plant breeding over hundreds of years. De- spite this economic and nutritional importance the soybean genome was largely uncharacterized until 2004. Research described in here deals with the application of novel sequencing technologies to elucidate the soybean genome composition as an initial step to understanding the organization of the genome.;Three, partially independent, studies were performed to study soybean genome content and diversity. The first study applied 454 pyrosequencing to obtain a low coverage survey that identified repeat composition of the genome. The second study compiled data from numerous small RNA sequence datasets to follow the small RNA level regulation of soybean genes and the maintenance of genomic stability by siRNA mediated heterochromatization. The third study applied a reduced represenatation sampling strategy to identify SNP markers in the non-repetitive regions of the genome that can distinguish between soybean accessions. The method developed in this study should be generally applicable to other lines of soybean or even in other crop plants that have a fully sequenced genome. These studies, along with others reported simultaneously, and those that will be conducted in the near future, together enhance our understanding of soybean and increase our ability to manipulate this important species to our advantage. |
