Gene silencing through RNAi has been successfully used in the functional characterization of plant genes . However, the incomplete inactivation of target genes is a common problem with such gene silencing approaches and makes the data interpretation difficult . T-DNA insertion mutagenesis, in which insertion of T-DNA into the coding or promoter sequence of a gene can disrupt its function, has been effectively utilized in Arabidopsis [5–7]. Gene editing has been shown to be a powerful approach for the functional analyses of genes in plant species including maize [8, 9]. In soybean, the main bottleneck associated with the application of RNAi, T-DNA insertion mutagenesis or gene editing approaches for functional analyses of a large number of genes is the lack of a high-throughput transformation procedure and availability of large greenhouse spaces for growing transformants.