Soybean Functional Genomics: Bridging the Genotype-to-Phenotype Gap

Technological advances coupled with the economic importance of soybean have led to increased efforts to understand gene function and associate genes with phenotypes of agronomic and fundamental interest. Functional genomics approaches aim to develop sufficient understanding needed to bridge the genotype-to-phenotype gap. In general terms, functional genomics approaches begin by using highly parallelized methods to analyze genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and metabolomes to generate hypotheses about genes that control phenotypes. Candidate genes are then tested for their contributions to phenotypes through various methods such as RNA silencing, genetic mutation, or overexpression. In this chapter, we review the current approaches, tools, and resources that are being applied for functional genomics research in soybean.