New insights to fight soybean pest
A new method, developed by US researchers, can help breeders develop new soybean varieties with greater and more reliable resistance against the soybean cyst nematode.
In the article, published by ScienceDaily, it is stated that soybean cyst nematode is the number one soybean pest worldwide, accounting for estimated annual losses of nearly $1.3 billion in the United States. Some soybean varieties have resistance to the tiny parasitic worms through conventional breeding of naturally occurring resistance genes, but the current level of resistance is becoming less reliable.
A new method, developed by University of Illinois researchers, is able to efficiently quantify this variation for the first time. The new method has been tested in greenhouse trials to show that the more copies of the gene, the greater the resistance to soybean cyst nematode. Breeders can use this method to…
