Updated March 2, 2022:
Soybean meal cannot be directly used for animal feed mixtures due to the presence of various anti-nutritional compounds which reduce animal weight gain. During the life of this project, we have successfully created two gene-editing constructs to knock out Bowman-Birk inhibitors from soybean seeds. Using these constructs, we have successfully generated transgenic soybean plants. These transgenic events were grown in the greenhouse and seeds harvested from these plants were subjected to immunoblot analysis using antibodies raised against soybean Bowman-Birk inhibitor. The results of our analysis clearly demonstrate that the accumulation of Bowman-Birk inhibitor in these transgenic plants is inhibited. Thus, we have successfully generated transgenic soybean lines that do not accumulate the major proteinaceous anti-nutritional Bowman-Birk inhibitor. Now, we are ideally positioned to take advantage of our BBi knock out soybean lines to develop soybean cultivars that will require little or no processing. Additional research will lead to the development of soybean cultivars that will allow the use of raw of soybean meal in current markets (swine, poultry).