Objective  Anthracnose-resistance of varieties of soybean in China was assessed and classified to facilitate the breeding of resistant cultivars.

  Method  From 2011 to 2019, 590 varieties of domestic soybean cultivars were collected and challenged by an artificial inoculation of Colletotrichum truncatum to determine their degrees of resistance to anthracnose.

  Result   The test showed 70 of the varieties belonged to the resistant (R), 143 to the medium resistant (MR), 219 to the medium susceptible (MS), 148 to the susceptible (S), and 10 to the highly susceptible (HS) categories, representing 11.86%, 24.24%, 37.12%, 25.08%, and 1.69%, respectively, of the entire sampled population. The overall disease resistant rate (RR) in a particular year varied from year to year, ranging from 13.64% to 68.00%, with the highest shown in 2013, followed by 52% in 2012 and the lowest in 2016. The RRs of the spring varieties in the tropical and subtropical areas (S1), the summer varieties in the tropical and subtropical areas (S2), the spring-sowing green varieties (S3), the summer-sowing green varieties (S4), the spring soybean from Yangtze river basin (S5), the new variety from Fujian (S6), and the new varieties from other regions (S7) ranked from the lowest of S3 at 5.89% to the highest of S2 at 69.23%, while S4 being the second highest at 57.69%.

  Conclusion  Out of the 590 varieties, 36.10% were only resistant or moderately resistant to anthracnose with none exhibited high resistance. And, there was no spring-sowing green soybeans for fresh consumption being substantially resistant to the disease.