Mapping the Way to a Better Soybean

Scientists have completed the plant's genome. It could lead to better digestion for pigs and chickens, less water pollution and new ways to prevent crop disease. Transcript of radio broadcast:

01 February 2010

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report.

Soybeans are eaten by people and fed to animals. Some farmers grow them to replace lost nitrogen in the soil.

Soybeans were first grown in Asia thousands of years ago. Now scientists have a full genetic map of the soybean. This is the first genome completed for a member of the legume family.

The genome will make it easier to target different qualities and develop improved crops. Sequencing the genes, organizing all of them in order, will savemany hours of searching. It will make it easier to search for what each gene is responsible for.

A report on the genome appeared last week in the journal Nature.

Scott Jackson at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, helped lead the study team. He says the kind of soybeans they studied have forty-six thousand genes. Between seventy and eighty percent of them, however, are copies of other genes.

Some genes change or disappear over time. But Professor Jackson explains that soybeans have kept copies of most their genes. This is fairly unusual for plants, he says, and extremely unusual for animals.

Genes are organized along chromosomes. These contain molecules of DNA, the building blocks of life.