Deciphering the soybean molecular stress response via high-throughput approaches

Abstract

As a result of thousands of years of agriculture, humans had created many crop varieties that became the basis of our daily diet, animal feed and also carry 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. In Europe, 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 under changing or adverse conditions, namely stresses. To achieve this goal we need to recognize and understand the molecular dependencies underlying plant stress responses. With the advent of new technologies in studies of plant transcriptomes and proteomes, now we have the tools necessary for fast and precise elucidation of desirable crop traits. Here, we present an overview of high-throughput techniques used to analyze soybean responses to different abiotic (drought, flooding, cold stress, salinity, phosphate deficiency) and biotic (infections by F. oxysporum, cyst nematode, SMV) stress conditions at the level of the transcriptome (mRNAs and miRNAs) and the proteome.