Finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.) plays an important role in the less privileged societies in the arid and semi arid regions of Asia and Africa, as a source of food, fodder, weaning food, beverage etc and is grown under diverse environmental conditions in different altitudes and cropping systems. Due to limited availability and use of germplasm available locally with inadequate diversity, and inadequate research funds, have resulted in small gains, in most finger millet improvement programs around the world. In the present study, a mini core subset, comprising 65 accessions was developed from a core collection based on the global germplasm collection available at ICRISAT genebank. The distribution of accessions from different regions, adequate presence of races, subraces, and various morphological and agronomic characters in the mini core, indicate that it sufficiently represents all the characteristics of the core collection. Similarly, the range, mean and variance, Shannon – Weaver diversity index and correlation study indicated that all the 15 quantitative and five qualitative traits and the coadapted gene complexes are well preserved in the mini core. Hence, the mini core can be useful in identification of traits of importance for use in crop improvement programs, both through conventional and biotechnological methods, more efficiently and economically. click here to search the data

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