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Recombination is crucial for crop breeding because it can break linkage drag and generate novel allele combinations. However, the high-resolution recombination landscape and its driving forces in soybean are largely unknown. Here, we constructed eight recombinant inbred line (RIL) populations and genotyped individual lines using the high-density 600K SoySNP array, which yielded a high-resolution recombination map with 5636 recombination sites at a resolution of 1.37 kb. The recombination rate was negatively correlated with transposable element density and GC content but positively correlated with gene density. Interestingly, we found that meiotic recombination was enriched at the promoters of active genes. Further investigations revealed that chromatin accessibility and active epigenetic modifications promoted recombination. Our findings provide important insights into the control of homologous recombination and thus will increase our ability to accelerate soybean breeding by manipulating meiotic recombination rate., (© 2022 The Authors. Plant Biotechnology Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Plant breeding is one of the oldest and most important activities accompanying human civilization. During the past thousand years, plant breeding has achieved three significant innovations, each of which derives from introgression of new theories or technologies. These innovations have significantly increased the food supply and allowed for population development. However, with population increases and resource shortages, the world is continuously facing the challenge of food security, which calls for next innovation in plant breeding. Recent technological advances in multiple disciplines have boosted the development of omics, which is accelerating plant breeding. Here, we review the recent advances in omics and discuss our understanding of how interdisciplinary researches will prompt new innovations in plant breeding., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)