Improving Soybean Composition

Monogastic animals can not readily digest the raffinose and stachyose in soybeans, which reduces the amount of metabolizable energy that can be obtained from soybean meal. Researchers have shown that soybean cultivars, which are homozygous for the recessive allele stc1a, have a reduced content of raffinose and stachyose and an increase content of sucrose. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of the stc1a allele on agronomic and seed traits. Two populations were developed by crossing high-yielding cultivars with the homozygous recessive line. There were no significant differences in mean performance of stc1a and Stc1a lines in one or both of the populations of field emergence, seed yield, maturity, lodging, plant height, protein, oil or the fatty acids measured. The researchers concluded that it should be possible to develop homozygous recessive cultivars with reduced raffinose and stachyose that will perform as well as conventional soybean lines for the agronomic and seed traits measured in this test.

Neus, J.D., W.F. Fehr and S.R. Schnebly. 2005 Agronomic and seed characteristics of soybean with reduced raffinose and stachyose. Crop Sci. 45(2): 589-592.