Developing core collection will not solve the problem of low use of germplasm as the size of the core collection would be unwieldy for convenient exploitation by breeders and crop improvement scientists. In pigeonpea, even a core collection consisting of 1290 accessions developed at ICRISAT genebank (10% of total accessions) is large. Hence, a mini core collection of pigeonpea, comprising 146 accessions click here to search the data. (about 10% of core collection or 1% of entire collection) was constituted by evaluating the core collection of 1290 accessions for 34 morphoagronomic traits. Results indicated that almost the entire genetic variation and a majority of coadapted gene complexes present in the core subset are preserved in the mini core subset. Due to its greatly reduced size, the mini core subset will provide a more economical starting point for proper exploitation of pigeonpea genetic resources for crop improvement for food, feed, fuel and other agricultural and medicinal purposes (Upadhyaya et al. 2006; Crop Sci. 46:2127-2132). At ICRISAT we have identified new sources resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and for agronomic traits in the mini core collection.

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