The complete genome of soybean, which is the world's most important economic crop, has successfully been sequenced by American scientists, revealing some very surprising findings and opening up the potential to come up with improved strains.

As estimated by the researchers, soybean has about 1.1 gigabase genome and nearly 46,430 genes, and the numbers are some 70% more than Arabidopsis and over twice more than those possessed by humans.

What was really surprising was that most of these soybean genes, nearly 785 of them, occur around the ends of the chromosomes, which is where most of the recombination happens, while some 50% of the genome sequences takes place in "repeat-rich, low-recombination heterochromatic regions surrounding the centromeres".

Also, it appears that the crop has a highly duplicated genome. It has been revealed that nearly three quarters of the genes were copied in multiple places.

The sequencing of the genome was undertaken with a whole genome shotgun measure and put together with physical and high density genetic maps.

Most of the study and sequencing was undertaken at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California.