Character Association and Genetic Diversity in Soybean to Formulate a Sound Breeding Program – A Review

Soybean is nature most precious gift and on account of its three dimensional utility as pulse, oil seed and vegetable has vital importance of its own as a cash crop of large number of people in the different states of India. It has a wide range of genetic diversity which provides a tremendous scope for genetic improvement of economic traits. An improvement in yield and quality characters in soybean crop is normally achieved by selecting the genotypes with desirable character combinations existing in nature or by hybridization. Hence, the information in a collection of some genotypes of soybean in order to formulate a sound breeding plan for its improvement has been reviewed here.