ORIGINAL PAPER Isoflavone Content of Soybean Cultivars from Maturity Group 0 to VI Grown in Northern and Southern China

Abstract Soybean isoflavone content has long been con-sidered to be a desirable trait to target in selection programs for their contribution to human health and plant defense systems. The objective of this study was to determine iso-flavone concentrations of various soybean cultivars from maturity groups 0 to VI grown in various environments and to analyze their relationship to other important seed char-acters. Forty soybean cultivars were grown in replicated trials at Wuhan and Beijing of China in 2009/2010 and their individual and total isoflavone concentrations were deter-mined by HPLC. Their yield and quality traits were also concurrently analyzed. The isoflavone components had abundant genetic variation in soybean seed, with a range of coefficient variation from 45.01 % to 69.61%. Moreover, individual and total isoflavone concentrations were signif-icantly affected by cultivar, maturity group, site and year. Total isoflavone concentration ranged from 551.15 to 7584.07 lg g-1, and averaged 2972.64 lg g-1 across environments and cultivars. There was a similar trend regarding the isoflavone contents, in which a lower iso-flavone concentration was generally presented in early rather than late maturing soybean cultivars. In spite of significant cultivar 9 year 9 site interactions, cultivars with consistently high or low isoflavone concentrations across environments were identified, indicating that a genetic factor plays the most important role for isoflavone accumulation. The total isoflavone concentration had sig-nificant positive correlations with plant height, effective branches, pods per plant, seeds per plant, linoleic acid and linolenic acid, while significant negative correlations with oleic acid and oil content, indicating that isoflavone con-centration can be predicted as being associated with other desirable seed characteristics