Environmental Association Analyses Identify Candidates for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Glycine soja, the Wild Progenitor of Cultivated Soybeans

Understanding the genetics basis of adaption is a fundamental goal of biological research. The present study explores an ex situ conservation collection, the USDA germplasm collection, genotyped at 32,416 SNPs, to identify population structure and test for associations with bioclimatic and biophysical variables in Glycine soja, the wild progenitor of Glycine max (soybean). Candidate loci were detected that putatively contribute to adaptation to abiotic stresses.

The sampled accessions in this study are derived from the SNPs genotyped by Song et al. (2015) and catalogued in the USDA soybean germplasm collection (http://soybase.org/snps/index.php). Accessions without latitudinal and longitudinal data were excluded, as were those with greater than 10% of data missing. Additionally, eight accessions from Taiwan and Northern Russia were excluded due to those being geographical outliers. A list of accessions used in the study can be found in the data files below. Environmental association was performed using data from public repositories of global bioclimatic (WorldClim) and biophysical variables (ISRIC), and a list of the variables retrieved per accession can be found in the data files below.

Sponsorship: United Soybean Board; Minnesota Varietal Development Fund; MnDRIVE 2014 Global Food Ventures Fellowship

• Resource Title: Environmental Association Analyses Identify Candidates for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Glycine soja, the Wild Progenitor of Cultivated Soybeans.

  File Name: Web Page, url: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/182430

  Link to dataset in the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM).