Abstract:The photoperiod sensitivity of soybean limits the popularization of excellent soybean varieties for planting. In this study, we created new soybean varieties with early maturity and stable yield by reducing the sensitivity of soybean to photoperiod and expanding the planting range of good varieties. Three soybean GmphyA2 pure mutants were obtained using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. The created gmphya2 mutants encodes a truncated protein without PHY structural domain due to a base deletion resulting in a code-shift mutation. Comparisons were made to characterize the fertility, plant size, and yield of the gmphya2 mutant and the WT. The results showed that because of significantly increased expression of GmFT2a and GmFT5a during the pre-flowering period, the gmphya2 mutant flowered 5-6 days earlier and matured 6-11 days earlier relative to the WT. Although the fertility period was shortened, the single grain weight was not significantly different from that of the WT due to a significant increase in both the effective number of branches and the number of grains per plant in the gmphya2 mutant. These results indicate that the editing of GmphyA2 usingCRISPR/Cas9 technology has created a new soybean germplasm with unchanged yield per plant with shortened fertility period, which provides a new genetic resource for breeding for early maturity and high yield.