Sunday, November 26, 2017

High yielding soybeans with high protein content

Farmers have been growing soybeans used in animal seed that produce a high yield rather than a high protein content, as referred to in the article.  The protein content and yield have been negatively correlated until researchers have tested a protein increasing gene in two varieties of soybeans and the results they obtained were promising for increasing the protein content while increasing yield at the same time.  This is a great solution because the farmers are paid based on weight not protein content, so otherwise the soybeans being produced would have low protein contents.  The gene found in the soybeans was on chromosome 15 which greatly increased protein content while decreasing only slightly the seed oil concentration.  The gene found on chromosome 20 was responsible for increasing the protein content, but was also found to decrease the yield drastically.  The gene on chromosome 15 was used to increase and counteract the gene on chromosome 20 that reduced yield.  The researchers were able to achieve results from using the gene on chromosome 15 to increase protein content as well as yield.

This article was interesting because I never really thought about how farmers were paid for growing their produce.  So choosing a variety that codes for higher yields would make more sense for the farmers to grow.  With the knowledge to grow soybeans with high protein as well as high yield would mean the animal feed has more nutrition in it and can help the animals grow better without the use of other alternatives of making the animals grow quicker. 

2 comments:

  1. All about the money. Money is time and time is money they want to optimize the growth and speed up the process as much as possible. I do think that this article is very interesting in the fact that protein content can be tweaked, this raises lots of questions regarding other protein rich plants. Very cool.

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  2. Increasing the yield of soy plants is probably the most important thing in the world , although there isn't as much protein the amount of food that our society needs is increasing and the amount of food products that contain soy is increasing at an even faster rate, feeding more people is always a good thing.

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