By Susan Milius
Scientists finally do know beans about soybeans, thanks to a newly unveiled genome sequence.
The plant’s DNA contains a surprising amount of duplication, says geneticist Scott Jackson of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Having the soybean’s genetic blueprint, he says, should help scientists both improve crop varieties and study the evolutionarily important process of genome doubling.
Soybean’s set of chromosomes has copied itself at least twice, approximately 59 million years ago the first time and then again about 13 million years ago, Jackson and his colleagues report in the Jan. 14 Nature. Redundant genes often retool or vanish, but soybean plants still have multiple copies of almost three-quarters of their genes, the researchers say.