**15. Future directions**

Breeding for soybean seed composition traits is a complicated process; fortunately, ample genomic resources and tools are now available to soybean breeders/ researchers for dissection of seed composition traits. The combination of conventional breeding strategy and genomic approaches will help to identify genomic loci, haplotypes, and FMs in breeding for improvement of seed composition traits. For improvement of protein, the major protein QTL, which was repeatedly mapped

on Chr20, Chr15, and Chr18, may facilitate breeders to select parental lines and consider them for crossing schemes or introgression into locally adapted superior yielding cultivars through genomics-assisted breeding and MAS. Issues related to protein increase without yield drag, pleiotropic effects, and background/allelic effects could be addressed via screening diverse germplasm, considering wild soybean alleles for introgression, undertaking genomics-assisted breeding, precise high-throughput phenotyping, mutational breeding, and genome editing through Crisp/Cas. Integrating these aspects will extend our current genetic and genomic portfolio far beyond that of traditional breeding. Finally, when a cultivar with improved food-grade characteristics is developed, a further step is the evaluation of the quality of the product obtained from this cultivar. This is important as the success of a food-grade soybean cultivar is determined by the preferences of the consumers.
