Weiguo Lu , Lijun Qiu

Modern Agricultural Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
Author    Correspondence author
Legume Genomics and Genetics, 2026, Vol. 17, No. 1   
Received: 11 Feb., 2026    Accepted: 14 Feb., 2026    Published: 24 Mar., 2026

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Drought stress is a major abiotic stress factor that limits soybean growth and development, yield formation, and quality stability; its impact spans multiple critical stages, including germination, vegetative growth, reproductive development, and grain filling. With the rapid advancement of high-throughput sequencing technologies, transcriptomics has emerged as a crucial tool for deciphering the molecular mechanisms underlying drought tolerance in soybeans. Focusing on the theme of "transcriptomic analysis of soybean responses to drought stress," this review begins by outlining the physiological basis of soybean drought responses. It then systematically summarizes the workflow, data analysis methods, and strategies for identifying differentially expressed genes using RNA-Seq technology in drought tolerance research. Particular emphasis is placed on summarizing the regulatory roles of transcription factor families-such as WRKY, NAC, bZIP, and DREB-in drought signal transduction, osmotic adjustment, antioxidant defense, and hormonal responses. Furthermore, by integrating studies on non-coding RNAs, co-expression networks, and candidate gene functional validation, this review explores the structural characteristics of multi-layered gene regulatory networks involved in soybean drought responses. The review also utilizes comparative transcriptomic analyses of soybean accessions with varying degrees of drought tolerance to analyze the expression patterns of key drought-tolerance genes and assess their potential for application in molecular breeding. Overall, transcriptomics has not only deepened our understanding of the mechanisms underlying soybean responses to drought stress but has also provided a theoretical foundation for the discovery of drought-tolerance genes, the development of molecular markers, and precision breeding. Future research should prioritize the integration of multi-omics data with field-based phenotyping to enhance the depth of mechanistic analysis and improve the efficiency of breeding applications.

Soybean (Glycine max L.); Drought stress; Transcriptomics; Differentially expressed genes; Drought-tolerance breeding