System for Identifying Pests and Diseases in Soybean Crop through Natural Language Processing

The presence of technologies in the agronomic field has the purpose of proposing the best solutions to the challenges found in agriculture, especially to the problems that affect cultivars. One of the obstacles found is to apply the use of your own language in applications that interact with the user in Brazilian Agribusiness. Therefore, this work uses Natural Language Processing techniques for the development of an automatic and effective computer system to interact with the user and assist in the identification of pests and diseases in soybean crop, stored in a non-relational database repository to provide accurate diagnostics to simplify the work of the farmer and the agricultural stakeholders who deal with a lot of information. In order to build dialogues and provide rich consultations, from agriculture manuals, a data structure with 108 pests and diseases with their information on the soybean cultivar and through the spaCy tool, it was possible to pre-process the texts, recognize the entities and support the requirements for the development of the conversacional system.

Breeding a Soybean Cultivar Heinong 531 with Peking-Type Cyst Nematode Resistance, Enhanced Yield and High Seed-Oil Contents

Soybean cyst nematode (SCN) is a destructive threat to soybean production. It’s of economic importance to develop a new SCN-resistant soybean cultivar with high yield and other good agronomic traits. In this study, a yellow-seed-coated and yellow-hilum-pigmented cultivar Heinong 531 belonging to maturity group I was developed by a pedigree breeding method through a testcross between a female parental SCN-resistant soybean cultivar Pengdou 158 and a male parental line F1 (high-yield but SCN-susceptible Hefeng 55 x SCN-resistant Kangxian 12). Heinong 531 was evaluated for SCN resistance in both SCN-infested field and autoclaved soil inoculated with hatched second-stage juveniles of SCN HG Type 0. The results indicated that SCN development at all stages in Heinong 531 was suppressed and the female index was only 1.6-5.6%. Heinong 531 as well as Pengdou 158 and Kangxian 12 were identified to carry the Peking-type resistance with both rhg1-a GmSNAP18 and Rhg4 GmSHMT08 genes. In the two-year regional trials, the average yield of Heinong 531 reached 2805.0 Kg/ha and the one-year production trial demonstrated an average yield of 2751.5 Kg/ha with yield increase of over 12.0% when compared to the local cultivars. The average seed-fat (oil) contents of Heinong 531 reached up to 22.3%. The Peking-type SCN-resistant Heilong 531 cultivar with enhanced yield and high seed-oil contents was just released in China in June, 2021 with certified number of ‘Heishendou 20210004’. These good agronomic traits make Heinong 531 prospective in a wide extension to control SCN in the main soybean-producing areas of Northeast China.

Effects of Salinity Stress on the Growth, Physiology, and Yield of Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill)

This study was conducted to evaluate the salt tolerance ability of two soybean cultivars under salinity conditions using a selection of growth and physiological parameters. Three weeks after germination, plants began being treated with either a 100 mM concentration of NaCl in Hoagland solution or a non-salinity (0 mM NaCl) solution. The results showed that the plant height, number of leaves, leaf area index, and shoot and root biomasses were significantly reduced under salt conditions. A similar tendency was observed in several physiological parameters (SPAD, Fv/Fm). Since all the salt-treated plants of the D8 cultivar were dead after 40 days under the 100 mM NaCl treatment, the yield of D8 could not be obtained, while the treated plants of the D140 cultivar experienced a marked decrease in yield compared to the control plants. In this study, we identified that the D140 soybean cultivar had a better salt tolerance than the D8 soybean cultivar at a 100 mM NaCl concentration.

Genome Assembly of the Popular Korean Soybean Cultivar Hwangkeum

Massive resequencing efforts have been undertaken to catalog allelic variants in major crop species including soybean, but the scope of the information for genetic variation often depends on short sequence reads mapped to the extant reference genome. Additional de novo assembled genome sequences provide a unique opportunity to explore a dispensable genome fraction in the pan-genome of a species. Here, we report the de novo assembly and annotation of Hwangkeum, a popular soybean cultivar in Korea. The assembly was constructed using PromethION nanopore sequencing data and two genetic maps, and was then error-corrected using Illumina short-reads and PacBio SMRT reads. The 933.12 Mb assembly was annotated as containing 79,870 transcripts for 58,550 genes using RNA-Seq data and the public soybean annotation set. Comparison of the Hwangkeum assembly with the Williams 82 soybean reference genome sequence (Wm82.a2.v1) revealed 1.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms, 0.5 million indels, and 25 thousand putative structural variants. However, there was no natural megabase-scale chromosomal rearrangement. Incidentally, by adding two novel subfamilies, we found that soybean contains four clearly separated subfamilies of centromeric satellite repeats. Analyses of satellite repeats and gene content suggested that the Hwangkeum assembly is a high-quality assembly. This was further supported by comparison of the marker arrangement of anthocyanin biosynthesis genes and of gene arrangement at the Rsv3 locus. Therefore, the results indicate that the de novo assembly of Hwangkeum is a valuable additional reference genome resource for characterizing traits for the improvement of this important crop species.

An early cold- and drought-resistant soybean variety Triada

The early maturing soybean cultivar Triada was developed as a result of individual selection in F4 from the hybrid combination Belogorskaya × Vilana on differentiating backgrounds for traits of reduced response to day length, cold and frost resistance, drought tolerance. Additionally, the degree of cold resistance of the initial germplasm for the breeding from a cultivar Iney was evaluated by a cryosedimentation method. According to the results of the variety trials of 2019–2020, the cultivar Triada in terms of yield exceeded the standard cultivar Slavia by 0.62 t/ha. The height of plants at the latitude of Krasnodar (45°) is 95–125 cm. The new high-yielding soybean cultivar Triada is highly resistant to low air and soil temperatures, and reacts weakly to nonoptimal day lengths. This allows it to be cultivated as a main crop in the Northern Caucasian, Central Chernozem and Low Volga regions of the Russian Federation, as well as in the Republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan at geographic latitudes from 40 to 50°.