Approaches, applicability, and challenges for development of climate-smart soybean

Soybean (Glycine max L.) is an economically important crop providing a great source for vegetable oil and protein. Yield losses of soybean under current climate change keep increasing, despite the progressive increase in yield through breeding and management practices since the 1960s. Conventional breeding facilitated the development of high-quality soybeans with enhanced tolerance to severe environmental fluctuations such as drought, flooding, heat, and salinity. However, conventional approaches are laborious, time consuming, and looks inefficient to fulfill the increasing demands of the growing world population. The advances in marker-assisted and genomics-assisted breeding, sequencing technologies, and bioinformatics tools have enabled the soybean improvement at a faster pace. The rapidly accumulating genomic resources have enabled the development of molecular markers associated with many important quantitative trait loci, provided a clear picture of genomic variations in soybean germplasm, and identified key genes for genetic engineering. This knowledge is being utilized to facilitate the development of climate-smart soybeans. In this chapter, we discuss and summarize the advances in soybean improvement through conventional and genomics-assisted breeding, genetic engineering approaches, and available bioinformatics tools for soybean. This chapter also highlights soybean genetic resources, diversity analysis, association mapping, as well as recent strategies such as gene editing and nanotechnology application in soybean breeding programs. This information could facilitate the incorporation of climatic-smart traits in breeding for more stable soybean production with the changing climate.