Having the new soybean sequence as a reference is expected to increase the speed and reduce the costs of resequencing the 20,000 stored soybean lines.The study was authored by Jeremy Schmutz of the Joint Genome Institute and the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center, the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, Purdue University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and 43 other researchers from 18 institutions. The Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, USDA and United Soybean Board supported the research.Schmutz said that the soybean sequencing was the largest plant project done to date at the Institute. “It also happens to be the largest plant that’s ever been sequenced by the whole genome shotgun strategy – where we break it apart and reassemble it like a huge puzzle,” he said.
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