文档介绍：Mapping the Way to a Better Soybean
Scientists pleted the plant's genome. It could lead to better digestion for
pigs and chickens, less water pollution and new ways to prevent crop disease.
Transcript of radio broadcast:
01 February 2010
This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
Soybeans are eaten by people and fed to animals. Some farmers grow them to replace
lost nitrogen in the soil.
Soybeans were first grown in Asia thousands of years ago. Now scientists have a full
ic map of the soybean. This is the first pleted for a member of the
legume family.
The genome will make it easier to target different qualities and develop improved
crops. Sequencing the genes, organizing all of them in order, will save many hours
of searching. It will make it easier to search for what each gene is responsible for.
A report on the genome appeared last week in the journal Nature.
Scott Jackson at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, helped lead the study
team. He says the kind of soybeans they studied have forty-six thousand genes. Between
seventy and eighty percent of them, however, are copies of other genes.
Some genes change or disappear over time. But Professor Jackson explains that soybeans
have kept copies of most their genes. This is fairly unusual for plants, he says,
and extremely unusual for animals.
Genes anized along chr