LAUSR

Soybean is an important oilseed crop which supplies both industrial processes and animal feed as well as having a number of food uses. The high yields of oil from soybean seed, along with large planting acreage, significant production infrastructure, and its capacity to fix nitrogen, make it the second most valuable crop in the USA and fourth in the world. In this review, we discuss the current understanding of the genetics of fatty acid biosynthesis in plants, based on soybean and other species. We describe recent biotechnological approaches to improve or alter oil content and oil profile in soybean. We provide a list of the presently understood genetic variants, both natural and induced by mutagenesis, in the known soybean fatty acid biosynthesis genes, including four mutations not previously described. We discuss the implications of the increasing amount of genomic data available for composition improvement, using the known fatty acid biosynthesis genes as a case study, and describe potentially new oil gene mutants based on genome sequence data.