Improved Soybean Feed for Use in Aquaculture

Soybean meal has long been a critical input for animal feed in monogastric animals (such as chickens and pigs) as it provides an ideal protein profile to promote healthy, rapid animal growth at a competitive price. More recently, aquaculture, the fastest growing commercial animal protein segment, has sought to take advantage of the protein and cost advantages of soybean meal as an affordable protein substitute to more expensive and less sustainable fish feeds. In 2013, global aquaculture feed included approximately 15 million metric tons of soybean meal, or about 525 million bushels of soybeans. With global aquaculture production poised to double in the next 20 years the need for sustainable, cost effective feed inputs will be greater than ever - and soybean-based feeds must be part of the solution. Unfortunately, soy feeds use in aquaculture remains limited due to the presence of anti-nutritional factors (ANF) including undigested oligosaccharides, lectins that damage the intestinal lining and phytate that binds to and prevents the uptake of proteins.Our ultimate goal is to generate a soybean variety (or soybean varieties) with eliminated or reduced ANFs to support increased feed conversion ratios (FCRs) and allow for greater soybean meal inclusion in feeding rations. Our project will leverage Arcadia's robust soybean TILLING library, which has enough genetic diversity to evaluate the ANF levels in plants with a range of mutations in targeted genes - thus creating the best potential to identify commercially attractive traits. More precisely, in phase 1 we will identify allelic series of nonsense and missense mutations in genes directly responsible for the synthesis of the three targeted ANFs.In phase 2, the best mutations for each of the ANF traits will be introgressed into an elite soybean variety. The effects of each mutation on the phenotype and agronomic characteristics of the new varieties will be evaluated individually and in combination to produce a "low ANF" variety with competitive agronomic performance.