Increasing seed size and quality by manipulating BIG SEEDS1 in legume species.

Plant organs, such as seeds, are primary sources of food for both humans and animals. Seed size is one of the major agronomic traits that have been selected in crop plants during their domestication. Legume seeds are a major source of dietary proteins and oils.

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr].

In this chapter we describe an Agrobacterium tumefaciens transformation method of soybean that utilizes mature half seeds and regeneration from the cotyledonary node region. This method results in fertile transformed soybean plants and transgenic seed in approximately 9 months. Using mature half seeds as starting material has proven to be a reliable method that does not require additional wounding for infection to occur.

Recombinant expression of homodimeric 660 kDa human thyroglobulin in soybean seeds: an alternative source of human thyroglobulin.

Soybean seeds possess many qualities that make them ideal targets for the production of recombinant proteins. However, one quality often overlooked is their ability to stockpile large amounts of complex storage proteins. Because of this characteristic, we hypothesized that soybean seeds would support recombinant expression of large and complex proteins that are currently difficult or impossible to express using traditional plant and non-plant-based host systems.

High-throughput linkage analysis of Mutator insertion sites in maize.

Insertional mutagenesis is a cornerstone of functional genomics. High-copy transposable element systems such as Mutator (Mu) in maize (Zea mays) afford the advantage of high forward mutation rates but pose a challenge for identifying the particular element responsible for a given mutation. Several large mutant collections have been generated in Mu-active genetic stocks, but current methods limit the ability to rapidly identify the causal Mu insertions.

Establishment of a soybean (Glycine max Merr. L) transposon-based mutagenesis repository.

Soybean is a major crop species providing valuable feedstock for food, feed and biofuel. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in developing genomic resources for soybean, including on-going efforts to sequence the genome. These efforts have identified a large number of soybean genes, most with unknown function.