Drought is a critical stressful environmental factor impairing soybean yield across large sections of soybean growing regions in the US. As the drought condition has a negative impact on soybean plants’ capability to utilize the atmospheric nitrogen for their growth and development, the effect of drought stress on the productivity of soybean is generally more significant than that of non-legume crops such as maize. The major goal of this project was to identify, characterize, and create new sources of drought tolerance critical for maintaining high productivity of soybean under drought stress. Since the whole project was initiated in FY21, we have made great efforts on genetic dissection of drought tolerance in a wild soybean accession and editing of several genes responsible for the plant’s sensitivity to drought stress. As the drought tolerance in the wild soybean accession has been found to be controlled by multiple quantitative trait loci (QTL) that are generally difficult to be pyramided into elite cultivars, this FY23 period focused primarily on enhancing the plant’s drought tolerance using gene-overexpression and editing approaches. Specifically, this FY23 period aims to create and characterize gene-overexpression and editing lines of different target genes for reduced sensitivity to drought stress and/or enhanced tolerance to drought stress. In the third quarter of the FY23 project, we obtained four gene-editing/overexpression progeny lines, some of which shoed enhanced tolerance to drought stress. We have advanced seeds for larger scale test for drought tolerance in greenhouse or controlled environment facility and for evaluation of basic agronomic traits in the field condition.