Twenty years of mining salt tolerance genes in soybean

Hoi-Sze Leung; Long-Yiu Chan; Cheuk-Hin Law; Man-Wah Li; Hon-Ming Lam

doi:10.1007/s11032-023-01383-3

Twenty years of mining salt tolerance genes in soybean

Mol Breed. 2023 May 23;43(6):45. doi: 10.1007/s11032-023-01383-3. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

Hoi-Sze Leung^#¹, Long-Yiu Chan^#¹, Cheuk-Hin Law^#¹, Man-Wah Li¹, Hon-Ming Lam^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Soybean Research of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, and School of Life Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR People's Republic of China.
² Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, 518000 People's Republic of China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Current combined challenges of rising food demand, climate change and farmland degradation exert enormous pressure on agricultural production. Worldwide soil salinization, in particular, necessitates the development of salt-tolerant crops. Soybean, being a globally important produce, has its genetic resources increasingly examined to facilitate crop improvement based on functional genomics. In response to the multifaceted physiological challenge that salt stress imposes, soybean has evolved an array of defences against salinity. These include maintaining cell homeostasis by ion transportation, osmoregulation, and restoring oxidative balance. Other adaptations include cell wall alterations, transcriptomic reprogramming, and efficient signal transduction for detecting and responding to salt stress. Here, we reviewed functionally verified genes that underly different salt tolerance mechanisms employed by soybean in the past two decades, and discussed the strategy in selecting salt tolerance genes for crop improvement. Future studies could adopt an integrated multi-omic approach in characterizing soybean salt tolerance adaptations and put our existing knowledge into practice via omic-assisted breeding and gene editing. This review serves as a guide and inspiration for crop developers in enhancing soybean tolerance against abiotic stresses, thereby fulfilling the role of science in solving real-life problems.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11032-023-01383-3.

Keywords: Ion homeostasis; Osmotic regulation; Oxidative stress response; Salt stress; Soybean; Transcription regulation.

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