Aboveground biomass
In this study, no significant differences were found in the aboveground
biomass between wild soybean and F1 plants, while the
aboveground biomass of the F2 population and
F3 population was significantly higher than that of
their female parent; thus, hybrids between wild soybean and GM soybean,
especially F2 and F3, had stronger
vegetative growth vigor than wild soybean. A similar conclusion was
reported by Guan et al. (2015), who measured the F1 and
F2 hybrids of two wild soybeans and glyphosate-resistant
soybean under greenhouse and field conditions and found that GM
F1 hybrids had similar dry weights of the aboveground
biomass, while both GM and non-GM F2 had a significantly
higher aboveground biomass than wild soybean in the field. Hybrid plants
with higher biomass were also observed in Brassica rapa (Moon et
al. 2007; Stewart et al. 2010), rice (Langevin et al. 1990) and
sunflower (Mercer et al. 2007), and the increased growth of hybrids
compared with that of wild plants might be due to the paternal parents
enhancing the plant performance of the hybrid (Mercer et al. 2007).