Recently, the scientific research team of Crop Application Genome of the School of Life Sciences, Qingdao Agricultural University(QAU) has successfully cloned out the major gene named GmHs1-1 that controls the hard-seededness of soybean coat. On June 22nd, 2015, the academic paper titled The calcineurin-like gene GmHs1-1 controls hard seededness in soybean was published online in Nature Genetics, a top international academic journal. The impact factor of this paper reaches up to 33.463. This research was finished by Purdue University in collaboration with three other universities, that is, QAU, University of Illinois and University of Missouri. Dr. Ma Jianxin, a Shandong Tarzan scholar of QAU, is the corresponding author, and Dr. Cai Chunmei is listed as one of the parallel first authors.

This paper makes clear the mutation types of the hard seed coat gene of wild and cultivated soybean, which provides an efficient identification method for the marker-assisted selection of hard and imbibition resources and also throws light on the gene mutation of soybean released cultivars during the artificial selection. This research will accelerate the identification process of the gene that controls this trait as for other soybean plants.

The website of the paper：http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3339.html

Translated by Ding Shuting