ABSTRACT
Soybean, Glycine max (L.), is grown as a commercial crop in over 80 countries and has long been recognized as a valuable component of medicine, food, and animal feed. It is an important crop as it contains both protein and oil resources. Due to its nutritional value, wide availability, low cost, and consistency in composition, soybean meal has displaced most other protein sources and become a vital component of poultry and swine feed. Together, poultry and swine feed account for over two thirds of soybean meal utilization in the United States. Therefore, there have been recent intensive efforts to improve soybean seed quality traits and agronomic characteristics via genetic engineering. This review summarizes the data relating to the commercial growth of biotech soybean, including field-testing applications and patent publications. It describes a variety of biotech soybean traits and methods that have been employed to generate these traits. A major focus is devoted to research and development of seed quality traits (i.e., essential amino acids, protein quality, oil, and tocopherols). Details of the many enabling technologies such as methods for transformation of biotech soybean plants and utilization of regulatory genetic elements (i.e., promoters) are not discussed here.
