ABSTRACT
Plant Genomics and Biotechnology, Public Policy Institute 113, Department of Plant, Soil and General Agriculture, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901-4415, USA; e-mail: ga4082@siu.edu
The development of a genome sequence for soybean (DOE JCSP, 2009) and high-throughput methods for marker scoring from worldwide advances in genetics like microarrays (Gupta et al. 2008; Hyten et al. 2008) and inexpensive Nextgen sequencing capacity (van Orsouw et al. 2007) provides tremendous power to those scientists engaged in the identification of genes underlying simple traits. In the next decade most simple gene traits will be associated with their underlying genes. However in paleo-tetrapolid soybean the phenotype of many mutants will be masked by genes in duplicated portions of the genome. Therefore, it is timely to review; the spectrum of allelic variations and mutants recorded over the last century; the phenotypes most amenable to identification by TILLING compared to those more tractable to identifications from fine mapping natural allelic variations; and principles and pitfalls of gene identification techniques for simple traits. Because the number of simply inherited traits is so large this chapter will focus on seed composition and disease resistance.
