Core and Mini-Core Collection in Crop Germplasm

Plant genetic resources are the fundamental raw materials, and breeding with them is the most sustainable strategy to conserve biodiversity. Because of the low usage of germplasm in crop improvement initiatives, there is a considerable disparity between the number of germplasm stored in genebanks and the number of germplasm employed in crop breeding around the world. Breeders are hesitant to employ germplasm in large part due to a lack of solid information on economic features other than linkage drag or to the disintegration of co-adapted gene complexes, which may cause cultivar development time to be prolonged. Reduced subsets of variability in a given species' germplasm collection stored in genebank, in the form of core or mini core collections, are good genetic resources for uncovering novel sources of variation for use in crop improvement initiatives.

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