These techniques usually include introducing genes from other species or genes that change soybean itself into soybean plants to improve soybean resistance, yield, quality or other characteristics. These technologies aim at creating soybean varieties with more stress tolerance, high quality and high yield by changing the plant genome.
Traditionally, methods to improve crop varieties include breeding, hybridization and mutation. But these technologies need to spend a lot of time, manpower and material resources, and progress is slow. With the introduction of genetic engineering technology, scientists can modify the genes of plants more quickly and accurately, and create new high-quality crop varieties.
Genetically modified soybeans are widely planted all over the world, and the largest producers are the United States, Brazil and Argentina. According to the data of the United States Department of Agriculture, the planting area of genetically modified soybeans in the United States is about 95 million mu, accounting for more than 90% of the national soybean planting area. Genetically modified soybeans are also planted in Brazil and Argentina.
Principle of transgenic soybean:
The development of transgenic soybean is to cooperate with the use of glyphosate herbicide. Herbicide is selective and non-selective, and glyphosate is a non-selective herbicide. Glyphosate-resistant transgenic crops are the largest transgenic crops in the world at present. The principle of glyphosate killing plants is to destroy EPSPS in chloroplasts or woody plants.
Through transgenic methods, plants can produce more EPSPS enzymes to resist glyphosate, so that crops will not be killed by glyphosate herbicides. With this genetically modified soybean, farmers don't need to use a variety of herbicides as in the past, but only glyphosate herbicide can kill all kinds of weeds.