Science China Life Sciences
Abstract
Soybean is a crop species that serves as the main source of plant protein and oil for both humans and animals. Along with the continuous increase in the global population and living standards, there is a need for more soybean production. Development of a genotyping platform with the characteristics of high throughput, high efficiency, and high precision but low cost is needed to facilitate soybean functional genomics studies and molecular design breeding. Here, based on genotyping by target sequencing liquid chip technology and our previous sequencing data from 2,898 soybean accessions, we developed the GenoBaits Soy40K array, which includes 81,717 background panel regions and 6,897 foreground polymorphisms of 49 previously reported functional genes. Tests involving 2,078 soybean samples demonstrated good performances of the GenoBaits Soy40K array in terms of genetic diversity and population structure analyses, genome-wide association studies, and function-aware haplotype map-assisted breeding. Moreover, the GenoBaits Soy40K array has the advantages of being relatively low-cost and flexible to be updated in a timely manner. Therefore, the GenoBaits Soy40K could be a powerful genotyping platform for soybean functional studies and molecular breeding.
