Millets are hardy crops adapted to marginal lands in hot, drought-prone arid and semiarid environments. Among the small millets, kodo (Paspalum scrobiculatum) millets is one of the most underresearched crops in terms of useful genetic and genomic resources available to breeders for genetic enhancement in these crops. A core collection is an important strategy to enhance use of diverse germplasm with agronomically beneficial traits in applied breeding. The entire germplasm collection of kodo (656 accessions) millet at ICRISAT was evaluated for 20 morphoagronomic traits in two rainy seasons at Patancheru, India. Quantitative traits data were subjected to residual (or restricted) maximum likelihood analysis and the best linear unbiased predictors were obtained. Qualitative traits data and standardized data on quantitative traits were used to determine Gower distance matrix, which was subjected to hierarchical cluster analysis following Ward method at R2 0.75 to form distinct clusters. About 10% or a minimum of one accession from each cluster were selected to form core collections, which consisted of 75 accessions in kodo millet accessions click here to search the data comparisons of means, variances, frequency distribution, diversity indices, and correlations indicated that the variation in the entire collection has been preserved in the core collection, which can be evaluated multilocationally to identify trait-specific diverse germplasm for use in genetic improvement of kodo millet.
Publications
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Upadhyaya et al. 2014. Forming core collections in barnyard, kodo, and little millets using morphoagronomic descriptors. Crop Sci. 54:2673-2682.