Unlocking the Soybean Genome: Genetics and Engineering with Dr. Bob Stupar
Good day and welcome to the University of Minnesota podcast Minnesota CropCast. I'm your host Dave Nicolai, University Minnesota Extension educator in field crops. I'm here today with my cohost doctor Seth Nave, University of Minnesota Extension soybean specialist. And Seth, we've been traveling around a lot this winter doing different types of meetings. You've been traveling around but we took the time to sit down and visit with one of our University of Minnesota coworkers, Doctor.
Dave Nicolai:Bob Stupar. And Bob, do you wanna introduce yourself a little bit for the audience in terms of what your present title is and maybe a kind of a short job description because I know you're you do a lot of things and you have a lot of hats so so forth in here at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. Sure. Sure thing. Thanks, Dave and Seth for inviting me to be part of this today. Yeah.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I've been at the university since 2008 as a faculty member in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, and I've my my position, my mandate is to work on the genetics and genomics of legume crops. So primarily soybean, but I also do a bit of work in pea as well. And, yeah, so my position is 25% teaching, 75% research. So I teach primarily graduate courses on molecular genetics, that's kind of my area of specialty. And I also lead a research program that's focused in the area of molecular genetics of crops, primarily soybean.
Dr. Bob Stupar:We ask questions like I mean, I kind of exist in this interesting space between basic and applied research where we ask fundamental questions about what genes do, why they're important to determine traits. But we also want to interact, and we collaborate a great deal with people like Seth and Erin Lorenz, university soybean breeder, entomologists, pathologists, and and some animal scientists and food scientists as well to see if we can translate what we're learning about these traits and make, you know, more efficient selection of those traits for for these different disciplines.
Seth:Alright, well, I think we should start at the beginning and then we'll come back. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, yeah. So where did you come from? Where did you grow up?
Seth:And, know, give us the story about how you got here.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. That's a it's a long story. I I grew up in Hales Corners, Wisconsin, which is a suburb of Milwaukee, and I I lived there the first eighteen years of my life. And I to be honest with you, I wasn't like an outstanding student up through high school. I was okay.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I good enough. But I didn't, like, find science until a little bit later in life. I came up to the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate and kind of didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a while. I kinda switched majors every second week like a lot of young people do for a little while. And then I I discovered biology and I got very into life science about my sophomore year of school.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And and I one thing that's great about coming to the University of Minnesota is it's full of research programs, and so I started to look for jobs where I could get some research experience, and I did that, and I found that I really liked doing that much more than other jobs I had done in the past, so. But still, I, you know, sort of vaguely was interested in biology, and then it wasn't it wasn't really until my senior year until I I had to write a paper for a class and I had to meet with somebody, a specialist in the field, and I wanted to write about plant breeding. It's just something I was learning about. I didn't know anything about it, but I wanted to learn about it because I had heard the Borlaug story and other sort of the humanitarian outputs and benefits of the field of plant breeding. And so I met with a professor in this department of agronomy and plant genetics named Don Rasmussen, And I interviewed him for my class, and Don was a, in addition to being a fascinating interview, he was also quite a strong advocate for the profession.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And he was the first person who ever said to me, you know, you should consider going into this field. You You should think about plant breeding and genetics. And here I was sort of aimless at that time and I thought, oh, that's a really interesting idea. So I I kinda took that with me and about a year later, I started applying to graduates, graduate programs to be a plant breeder. So I went, That ended up, landing me at the University of Wisconsin, and I was in a program called plant breeding and plant genetics.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I actually worked in, the state potato breeding program for for six years, and I focused my research on the molecular biology of of potatoes. And and then I actually returned to the University of Minnesota in 2005 as a postdoc. I worked for a guy named Nathan Springer who is in the Department of Plant Biology at the time, and I worked on maize genetics. So I worked for corn for a couple years, and I learned My my study there was mostly focused on trying to figure out the molecular basis for heterosis, why hybrids are so much better performing than inbreds. And so
Seth:And how'd that go for you? That's a
Dr. Bob Stupar:well, it was really exciting. We we learned a lot and we found a lot of cool things and we we published some really neat papers in that area. It was a very exciting time to work on that that subject because we we were just in this, we were doing this work shortly after really the emergence of genomics had started. So we were able to do some things that, you know, looking back on it now, that seems kind of small potatoes. But at the time, we thought, wow, this is the first time anyone's ever been able to actually ask this question in the kind of question and the kind of way we were asking it.
Dr. Bob Stupar:So it was really fun, but I, yeah, we found no magic sauce to heterosis, but we found some theories and we were able to sort of add new information to some old debates on that topic, so that was cool. And then I ended up just through sort of luck in life, I was able to apply for a job that came open here in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics a couple years later, and remarkably, though I had never worked on legumes before, I was able to to land the job, and it's become the passion of mine for, I guess, eighteen plus years now.
Seth:Okay. I love it. So I I just wanna drill in on one little thread in this It's whole the Don Rasmussen story and the Borlaug story. So we're very interested in keeping recruiting students that come from the farm to the University of Minnesota or trying to engage with suburban and rural or suburban and urban kids to come to the University of Minnesota to study agriculture. So what is that little nugget?
Seth:You mentioned both the Borlaug thing and you mentioned Don, of course. But tell me a little bit more, pull this out a little bit more about how you came what engaging about the plant breeding? Was it the agriculture and the food side of it, or what do you think drew you in?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. It's a great question, actually. And I and I don't often ask myself that question, so thank you. I think the the the first nugget was that I had taken a this is gonna sound kinda shallow, but I'd taken a course in genetics and I had never enjoyed a course, a a topic of research or study more than I had ever genetics is different than a lot of other fields of biology in that biology is so complex And the interactions in nature and in in the way of, say, a plant interacts with its environment and all the abiotic and biotic stresses that it encounters. Like, there's so many layers of complexity to understanding and modeling that.
Dr. Bob Stupar:But genetics in some ways has is a little bit more rule bound. The DNA sequence itself can do a lot of things to determine what comes out in the phenotypes and the traits that we see. And so when I started to learn about that, I I I said, oh, there's an actual code that we can understand and we can kind of break that and figure it out. And that opens up all kinds of new possibilities that make sense to me. And so that was, I guess, I wanted when I realized that I could do something with genetics and I could actually I say, I think the really the the winning argument for me was the humanitarian side.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Well, wow. This is how we feed people. This is how we clothe people. This is how we fuel the world. Know, how do how can we do this better?
Dr. Bob Stupar:How can we make this more, know, so how can we use this to solve problems? That was the thing that I think was was kind of the clincher for me. So I'm not sure if it was the Borlaug story per se, but the idea that, you know, there was a there was a job that I could do to to to kind of satisfy both my intellectual side and my, you know, my wish to be helpful on the humanitarian side.
Seth:Awesome. And and you I think the other side of it, I think you kind of alluded to, is just the the luck of the timing. You came in right at right at the beginning of this kinda new science. I, you know, this whole thing was bubbling around even when I was in graduate school. Randy Shoemaker, you know, millions of RFLP markers and looking at this kind of stuff for for soybean genetics back back in the day.
Seth:But that that now looking back at what they were doing over the course of ten and twenty years was really setting the stage, but it was it was on that slow plane of the incline. Right? So that's, you know, really hadn't picked up yet.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. The the you're absolutely right. So you you bring up I'm glad you brought up Randy Shoemake. I mean, some of the the really foundational researchers that we think of in the soybean community who were, you know, bumping up against this technology and trying to find new ways to use it. And, you know, even our our department head here, Gary Muehlbauer, is one of the earliest users of molecular markers in soybean when he was a graduate student with Jim Spector in Nebraska.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And I look at the progress that was made from the maybe late eighties, early nineties up through say about 2008, and it was gradual and it was really good. But then there was this, like, watershed moment where the soybean genome sequence was completed around two right right about when I started in 2008. And all of a sudden for somebody like me, it was I mean, it was it was the proverbial kid in a candy store. Like, all of a sudden, we had access to all of this information about these genes. We knew pretty much all the genes in soybean one day.
Dr. Bob Stupar:It just happened. We just had to figure out what they do. And so for a person like me who was genuinely curious about like, well, how can we use this information to, you know, provide better yield protection traits for instance? Like, there was all kind there's just this huge almost infinite number of things you could imagine working on. So I thought I I couldn't and even at the time, even in that moment, I was really impressed by my luck that I came into a field right when it was just starting to explode with new opportunities.
Seth:Yeah. But we can't I don't want you to sell yourself short because there's a lot of people that were looking at this stuff and thinking that this was their gonna be their ticket too. So I think there was you know, we saw a lot of people get on the bandwagon at that time, and there's only only some of them that became successful. So I think it's it's due in part to your knowledge and your hard work around this. So I think let's get back to where we started with this.
Seth:So you were talking about this kind of nebulous legume genetics, genomics area. So maybe let's parse it. Is there a way to divide it into a couple pieces? Dave has another question.
Dave Nicolai:I have another question. Actually it goes on to what you're just talking about Seth. But Bob, you know people are familiar obviously that we have a soybean breeder here at the University of Minnesota. We have Seth Nave as a soybean extension specialist. How does the work that you're presently involved in help both of these people?
Dave Nicolai:And I'm thinking about the soybean breeder and so forth. You aren't a soybean breeder by training perhaps, mean that is true. But nonetheless you intertwine. So are they using your information as building blocks and aware of genetics and so forth going forward or how do you feel that you are assisting and helping in some of those situations and and I'll just use soybean breeding for example.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So the I would say the, I'll just, I'll start by speaking broadly and saying that, you know, what I really do is commonly known as genomics. So I study the genes in the genome and what, and try to understand what they do, what control, how they control traits and so forth. The field of genomics, I think, in a lot of ways has really revolutionized plant breeding across many, many species. And it's done so in a couple different ways.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I would say the biggest, probably, and most immediate impact it had is it allowed breeders to start more efficiently selecting for traits based on DNA marker rather than phenotype per se, which might doesn't may not sound like much, but actually it's with some of these phenotypes, they're actually quite difficult and expensive to to do empirically. And so when you develop marker sorry. When you develop markers, you can start to predict there the phenotypes of these plants for a great reduced in cost reduction in cost and more efficiently. Yeah.
Dave Nicolai:Well, maybe mention how does this what I would use a local term, speed things up
Seth:Yeah.
Dave Nicolai:In terms of you know, if you think of phenotype we're talking about, okay, plant this line of soybeans and I look at it and I evaluate it over x number of years and follow it through, look at the yield characteristics, disease and so forth. But in your field, you're able to help that along and speed that up a little bit before they get to the field there. Exactly. So that you wanna explain a little bit about how that would interply?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. So a great example in soybean might be soybean cyst nematode where, you know, it's a kind of a difficult thing to phenotype. It's, it's quite you can try to do it in controlled environments. You can try to do it in, in field environments and so forth. But if you're if you're looking at, like, breeding populations where you say cross a resistant type versus a susceptible type, and you're trying to bring all kinds of different genes together for lots of different traits, but let's just say for a moment you don't have the time or the infrastructure to screen for cyst nematode in a in a greenhouse or in a field even, perhaps instead you can just look at the DNA of your whole population and predict which ones are the ones carrying the resistance genes based on a relatively simple and cheap molecular, you know, sort of lab assay.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And so a breeder can go through a huge amount of material, genetic material, pop breeding populations, parental populations, and they can say which genes are for cyst nematode are in those parents and in those progeny, and they can make their selections more efficient. Basically, it helps you put the bad stuff in the trash real early and start selecting from a very, a good, strong base of those populations. So assisted nematode's one example, but you can imagine doing this for any suite of treats or traits where you might have markers developed for them.
Seth:Okay. So then we've got kind of this marker assisted selection piece. How about novel genes and genetic variation in our soybeans? What portion of that are you involved with?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah, so I think that I'm really most involved with that is is in the what we might call the gene discovery space and trying to figure out what genes are important for certain traits. For example, we might know that there's a marker that's tied to a cyst nematode or an iron deficiency chlorosis tolerance QTL or a gene. But if we don't know the actual gene itself, it's kind of hard to explore the diversity of type of new, you know, resistance source, for instance. But if we actually what I do a lot of is we try to try to map what those genes are and we try to figure out what actual DNA sequence caused that phenotype or that trait. And so if we can identify those, then it'll allow us to go through the you know, we could imagine going through the entire germplasm of soybean, you know, tens of thousands of lines, trying to mine for the diversity of those those genes, and then test their ability to confer novel or better resistance traits, for example.
Seth:So for those of the listeners that don't maybe think about or don't spend a lot of time thinking about this kind of stuff, so give me the I think you can relay this story pretty quickly about what, if you had a student that was trying to identify a gene related to a certain trait, and you know it's in a certain area you're calling your QTLs. So give us an idea what that QTL might, how large that might be, how many genes might be in it. And then what's the first thing that student's gonna do if they know this kind of, this large QTL and they're looking for a gene of interest? What's the first thing they're gonna do when they look there?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah, so, and, you know, I don't mean to get too jargony, but QTL just means quantitative trait locus. It basically means the neighborhood on a chromosome where a gene is located. And so the assumption is is that whatever's conferring the good trait that you want is probably tied to a very small change in the DNA. The problem is there's lots of possible changes in DNA that might look like they're the good ones or that they might be the ones giving you the right trait. And so what we'll have to do oftentimes is create what we call segregating populations.
Dr. Bob Stupar:This goes back to, like, Mendelian, you know, Gregor Mendel genetics where he was crossing green and yellow soybeans and then watching them segregate and then try to figure out which DNA sequence changes. In our case, we would look at the DNA sequence changes that moves with the good gene in the in the population. So Mendi what we did what Mendel demonstrated with green and yellow peas can be done for almost any trait. That it that's controlled by a single gene. So some of the cis nematode resistance genes are like that.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Some the I d the iron deficiency chlorosis genes are like that. In fact, Seth, you and I worked on a on a novel trait that was was a single basically, single base DNA change that created a change in oil composition in the seed. So if you can if you're able to use sort of the the the system of genetics and recombination in a certain way, you can kinda narrow down all the possible candidates that might be causing the trait, and then you can figure it out. And if you can figure it out, the other thing that I didn't mention earlier that that it opens up your playbook for is, of course, biotechnology as well. So you can use mutations, mutagenesis type approaches, you can use genetic engineering, gene editing, this whole new platform of technologies that can let you create new variation that doesn't exist maybe in in nature right now.
Seth:So basically, if you have a really good idea what what that gene is, because you've already got an annotated sequence, you already know these genes that have been sequenced already have some probable, have some, many of them have some sort of an indication what they may be involved with, especially from another species. You could then go in and actually engineer a plant to do kind of a plusminus, right? Is that part of your proof of concept then for those genes? Is that something that you like to do in your work is to work backwards and then recreate that basically synthetically?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah, that's one of our goals. I mean, there's, from a research standpoint, first of all, doing the kind of engineering piece is really a great way to validate that you've actually found the right gene in the first place. So there's sort of the academic question of that. And then there's the more applied question that you're bringing up, which is can you then imagine ways that this gene can be used or altered in a way that would make it more beneficial to farmers? Yeah.
Dr. Bob Stupar:So that's sort of the longer term goal of everything we do is sort of trait based and figuring out how to most efficiently and effectively use that information.
Seth:So then I think to answer maybe Dave's question another way with Aaron Lorenz, for instance, you might turn over some of these genes of interest to him to breed back into populations and work with those that would advance this one more level of in an in an applied sense that would get it get those traits one step closer to the farmer's field. Right?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Exactly. So whatever we can develop in terms of either marker discovery or new or new gene or or allele discovery, we sort of by definition have
Seth:to work with Aaron's group because he's got
Dr. Bob Stupar:the breeding program to actually introgress these traits into elite material. And so and that that's we're really excited about those opportunities. We found some traits we're already in process of trying work with this program to do that.
Dave Nicolai:So I have a two part question. You mentioned research direction. Who helps you or how do you determine your research direction you know from a year to year process? Is there a committee, is there advice, is it just you know sitting around the you know the coffee shop and with lampreys and so forth and determine and say well that'll be a good thing to do but how do you set that direction? And the second part you know for some of us right now in an academic setting that they do what are called performance reviews.
Dave Nicolai:And they'll say well, Bob, tell us about what you did this last year, what are you proud of? What are the successes? So I'm gonna expand that horizon and so forth and say in the last five years Bob, in terms of if you had to nominate some highlights on that. So it's really a two part question is directionally the research and what are some things that are bubbling up so to speak that are really making a difference?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. Fantastic. So the what's the first part of the question again?
Dave Nicolai:A little bit of who's direct helping you further
Dr. Bob Stupar:Where the do the
Dave Nicolai:ideas come and from? And so forth. What are you how do you set those priorities?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. So that's a fantastic question actually. Now that you've there there's many different avenues by which we can determine that something is worth pursuing. I would say my probably the most common path that I find is is talking to colleagues and, you know, knowing what Seth and Aaron and and, you know, Bob Cook and and others on campus are looking at and are realizing our our priority areas for Minnesotans. I think I learn a lot from just talking to the others other folks in these sub disciplines who are have the sort of their finger on their on the pulse
Dave Nicolai:of Bob Bob is our entomologist. Yes. Yes. Okay.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And and then and and also talking to to farmers and the commodity board members, I think, has been really critical too because they they have a lot of they give us a lot of feedback about what's important to them and what what what products and what, you know, types of traits that that we should be thinking about and working towards. And then and then there's also the third level, which is sometimes funding agencies are just very explicit about what they want to fund. And so if I wanna write a grant and train a graduate student to work in a certain area to develop a certain trait or product, sometimes they just straight say, We were looking for somebody to work on X, Y, and Z, you know, drought cyst nematode and iron deficiency chlorosis, for instance.
Seth:Yeah, I might add that they're more explicit about what they don't want to fund. Also true. By default.
Dave Nicolai:So thinking about those successes, if you were writing your, not an annual report, let's say a five year report and so forth. Well, in the last couple of years that you've been successful with or been proud of, so to speak, in terms of that because of things that can make a difference here or move the needle on that. I won't ask you for the secret on the yield gene, but you can mention that too even though that may not be here or wherever.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. That okay. So that's yeah. The five year sort of accomplishment report is something we have to do. It's part of our job.
Dr. Bob Stupar:We we do it annually as also, but we also have to every five years sort of chart a new course and and think big picture about what we're doing. In terms of, like, the last five years for my program, there's a few things that sort of jump out as what I would think of as achievements that either were good for and to some extent, just good for the research community as a whole. I'd say the first one that we got involved with that I'm that I'm proud of is we were part of the, sort of the infrastructure of the soybean using the soybean genome is dependent on the reference genome that we use. It's, and so the first version of this came out in 2008, and then our group published in 2024 the most updated version of it. It's six of that of that assembly, and it was the most complete resource of that type for for soybean to date.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And so I was very encouraged that over years we kind of found some nuances in in that in that resource that we thought we could update and improve, and we did do that, as part of that project. We've also looked at, developing using gene editing as a as a tool to develop new traits for soybean that maybe improve the the the nutrition quality or at least reduce the anti nutritional qualities of some of the the the traits that we're working on. And so we've had some really interesting and intriguing developments in that area. That's sort of an in progress thing still, but it's something that we're starting to test and we're do we're working with food science or sorry, the animal scientists now to really understand what we've developed and if these are gonna be potentially good products in the antinutritional area. And I don't wanna get too long winded before I say this, so I'm just gonna say this now.
Dr. Bob Stupar:The other thing that I think is really important in terms of the products that we produce is the graduate student training opportunities that we've provided. And, as part of, like, our iron deficiency chlorosis project, Erin Lorenz and I and and actually going back, we've worked with Seth quite a bit on this as well. We've had some students come through that program, and they've their research achievements have been excellent, but also just the the ability to develop those students and see them move into industry and, become effective leaders at at that part of and stage of their career as well. Think, you know, arguably, you could say the most important products we we have are our students that we produce from the university. Maybe that's not even arguable.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I'm just afraid to say it. They are the most so I think that is I'm very proud to say I've been active in in helping and advising and developing that sort of the workforce in this area as well through our graduate and, to some extent, our undergraduate research opportunities here.
Seth:Excellent. And if they can have success working on a naughty problem like IDC, then they're gonna have success in their professional fields, whether they're in academia or in the private sector. So I wanted to go back and maybe tease each of these apart just a tiny bit. Because I think the reference genome thing is interesting because I think most people understand when we decode these genomes of each of these humans, the first humans and then soybeans and maize, how important that first step was. But now you introduce this next, you know, level here that there's a that that was one particular organism that essentially decoded at the time.
Seth:So give us just a little bit more about that. I think that's a nice little add on to what you do that would help people understand kind of the complexity of your work too.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yeah. So the it's a really interesting point because I think we've been in the genomics era of I mean, I guess you could say for about twenty five years. The first genomes that came out were human, I think, in was it '98 or '99? And then soybean was about ten years later. And so it's kind of I guess you're right.
Dr. Bob Stupar:It's it's not something that you'd see on the cover of Time Magazine, but the the genomes that are produced early on have some imperfections to them. And and over time, as as technologies for doing sequencing and and developing these maps have gotten better, we've been able to overcome and and sort of create what they call like a a basically a full chromosome map of the entire genome, which means in the case of soybean, about a billion base pairs of of DNA sequence that's been almost now perfectly decoded. And the thing that's really nuanced and I think important to know about that is this, among those 1,000,000,000 base pairs, there's about 50,000 genes. And what we call a gene kinda changes depending on the technology we use to resolve it and understand it. And so I think the newest version of the genome actually has slightly fewer genes than probably some of the earlier versions.
Dr. Bob Stupar:The thinking being that we're getting better at understanding what is and is not a gene, and so we've kind of eliminated some of the old ones that we thought were genes. They're no longer part of it. Yeah.
Seth:Wow. And this you're getting at a point that I didn't really wanna bring up, but it was I I chuckled a little bit when you when you introduced genetics as this this fairly straightforward cookbook type field that had had rules. Right. And I've always wondered how strict those rules were, and you just laid out some perfect examples about how how flawed or how imperfect maybe those rules are and where we are even in understanding these things. And even genetics that we feel that is a pretty well established science is still evolving considerably based on work that that people like you do.
Seth:Is that right?
Dr. Bob Stupar:Yes. And I I love that you brought that up because it I have a great example for you of where this can get really, really messy, and it's actually soybean cyst nematode. So that I was talking earlier about how some genes confer resistance. It turns out that sometimes those genes will only confer resistance when they're found in combination with another gene. So they actually interact with one another in ways that so it's not always as simple as saying, well, we have a DNA marker, we can just pick that DNA marker, and it's always gonna work.
Dr. Bob Stupar:It turns out maybe you need to have the right two or three g DNA markers altogether in order to make that work, and that's the complexity of how these different genes interact. And we really are just scratching the surface on understanding the mechanisms of how these genes work, how they work together, how they turn on, how they turn off. There's so many little pieces to this that that understanding that complexity is, you know, even in the era of AI, I don't think we very well modeled how biology really works, especially at like the cellular level.
Seth:And it's all based on the tools we're using. Because if you're using a tool that says presenceabsence of a particular gene, if it's there, that's one thing. But if you need 10 copies of it to have the full function, you're not getting the story because we actually have copy numbers are important too, and interactions, and interacting with all these things that may not be what we consider genes.
Dr. Bob Stupar:Exactly. It's amazing the different ways, the different mechanisms and polymorphisms that drive all the variation we see in life. And this is true for humans and yeast and plants and everything we work on that sometimes I actually wrote a paper recently on this topic of why some genes are easier to find than others, and the reason is because sometimes the polymorphism is obvious. It kinda fits the code, as I was saying earlier, the Mendel green and yellow pea sort of thing. And sometimes they're really hard to find because sometimes they're not even the DNA sequence itself.
Dr. Bob Stupar:It's something else that interacts with it that is really hard to find.
Seth:So what, we need to wrap up here. So what's next, or what's on the horizon? You know, you mentioned your five year review. Is there anything that you're going to put into there that you'd like to say, this is not something I've really worked on much, but it's on the horizon, or it's over the horizon, I can see something out there. Or what broad area without, you know?
Seth:Yeah.
Dr. Bob Stupar:I think the two things that I wanna keep working on that I'm not sure if it's new in the sense that I mean, way we attack it may be new, but the questions that we're asking are still the same ones that we're interested in. Mainly, how can we what are the genes that we can target for improved seed quality traits is a big one for me. It's something that I that I'm I feel like we've made a lot of progress in that area, but I'd like to learn more about it still. And the other is yield protection traits, mainly in the area of we wanna continue to work in that area of iron deficiency sclerosis. And, also, we've got some work on aphid resistance that I find is quite interesting that I'm hoping we can continue to expand upon.
Dr. Bob Stupar:And then the last thing that we're working on that it's it's old to me, but it's still kinda new because it's a it's a difficult project is plant architecture. You know, understanding the genes that control things like internode length, plant height, how does that how does that interact with the environment? How can we maximize yield? Is there a way we can go towards this idiotype, you know, of soybean that would allow us to really have a step change in how productive the plant is?
Seth:I ran into a guy last week, and he asked me specifically, what happened to the Christmas tree soybean? Yes. So we don't have time to talk about it now, but I think the listeners probably can envision the Christmas tree soybean, and it's part of an evolving story here with you and others working on plant architecture in soybean. Certainly gets farmers' attention when we have these very obvious phenotypes like that. Okay,
Dave Nicolai:Well, Bob, you mentioned that you do your five year report coming up on there, but I think you're doing a lot of things that would justify you coming back four or five years from now. So I'm gonna put you on the docket on schedule, Seth, if that's okay.
Seth:Yeah, we're gonna have Aaron, he and Aaron are gonna come and talk about some specific traits, and maybe we could even have one on seed quality coming up. So let's book these guys coming up.
Dave Nicolai:So you're gonna have your annual performance review probably with the department head, but also with us.
Dr. Bob Stupar:It's, yeah, actually we have to give a seminar to the department, I think in April. So that would, I mean, that's very soon, I mean. But I'm happy to come back anytime and talk about it.
Dave Nicolai:Well, consider us a warm up act for that. We'll ask the questions even ahead of that. So we thank you. Well, this is a good opportunity to wrap things up. Our guest today had been Bob Super with the University of Minnesota and in Plant Genomics.
Dave Nicolai:And he has a long pedigree of different things that he's involved with. But the important thing is that he's here and still working. So we appreciate him in his time and talk a little bit about what's going on in the field of genetics and also what the future is. So this has been Dave Nicolai with the University of Minnesota Extension podcast Minnesota CropCast. I've been your host along with Doctor.
Dave Nicolai:Seth Nave, Extension soybean specialist here at the University of Minnesota. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
