This past year, through matching funding from the Ohio Plant Biotechnology Consortium (OPBC) and the Ohio Soybean Council (OSC), we have developed the capacity to analyze the entire metabolic make up of various soybean lines, a process called metabolomics. We then applied this new technology to the analysis of soybean lines carrying specific genes for resistance to the soybean aphid and to new, resistant soybean plant introductions (PIs). We were able to identify the specific classes of metabolites that correlate to resistance in these soybean lines.

In the work proposed here, we wish to consolidate and extend these findings in two ways. First of all, we wish to identify the precise...