“…Even when cultivars are screened in artificially infested soil, disease incidence is unpredictable due to the sensitivity of symptomology to environmental factors Rupe et al, 1996;Farias Neto et al, 2008). Methods for assessing aggressiveness (i.e., amount of disease induced) in greenhouse studies include using soil infestation by growing the pathogen on sorghum grain (Hartman et al, 1997Huang & Hartman, 1998;Cho et al, 2001;Rupe et al, 2001;Mueller et al, 2002aMueller et al, , 2002bMueller et al, , 2003Aoki et al, 2005;Farias Neto et al, 2008;Franco et al, 2009), oat seeds (Scherm & Yang, 1996), sand-cornmeal Gray et al, 1999;Njiti et al, 2001), culture filtrates (Jin et al, 1996;Li et al, 1999), inoculation via a toothpick method Arruda et al, 2005), colonized agar plugs (Rupe, 1989), a detached leaf method (Franco et al, 2009) and conidial suspensions (Rupe et al, 1996;Njiti et al, 2001). Development of an accurate disease scoring method for screening resistance to these pathogens, in a rapid and uniform way in the greenhouse, is crucial for developing soybean cultivars with broadbased resistance to the SDS pathogens.…”