P0836 Soybean Transcription Factor ORFeome and Building Regulatory Network of Drought Resistance and Seed Development in Soybean

Chenglin Chai , University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
Babu Valliyodan , University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
Henry T. Nguyen , University of Missouri & National Center for Soybean Biotechnology (NCSB), Columbia, MO
Soybean (Glycine max L.) is one of the most important crops providing human abundant protein and fatty acids as well as health beneficial secondary compounds. However, various environments including drought adversely affect soybean growth and development and cause great yield loss, making it a great challenge to feed the fast-growing world population. Despite the past progress made on functional studies of individual genes that are involved in drought resistance and seed development, few genes have been practically applied to the genetic improvement of crop yield under drought conditions. This is to a large extent, due to lack of understanding of these biological processes and the limited genomic resources (e.g., candidate genes) available for genetic engineering. In this study we build the soybean genomic resource through the isolation of transcription factor (TF) full-length open reading frames (ORFs), particularly focusing on factors likely involved in regulation of genes associated with drought response and seed development. Our long-term goal is to identify key regulators governing drought resistance and seed development and to build the regulatory networks in soybean. By taking advantage of many sequence resources and expression profiling data in soybean and advances made in comparative genomics, we identify genes potentially involved in these processes and directly clone the full-length ORFs of these genes into the Gateway high-throughput cloning pENTR vector as entry clones. Various downstream studies including protein-protein interactions (yeast-two hybrid) and protein-DNA interactions (ChIP-Seq) will be performed by generating expression vectors via LR reaction between entry clones and selected Gateway compatible destination vectors.