Environmental Association Analyses Identify Candidates for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Glycine soja, the Wild Progenitor of Cultivated Soybeans

Understanding the genetics basis of adaption is a fundamental goal of biological research. The present study explores an ex situ conservation collection, the USDA germplasm collection, genotyped at 32,416 SNPs, to identify population structure and test for associations with bioclimatic and biophysical variables in Glycine soja, the wild progenitor of Glycine max (soybean). Candidate loci were detected that putatively contribute to adaptation to abiotic stresses.