Development and Validation of Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] Core Sets and Identification of Trait-specific Accessions from the Best Core Set

Abstract

Background: Core collection of germplasm accelerates breeding objective of a crop. A core set of trait specific accessions reduces time, money and valuable man power in any crop breeding system and Standard stratified clustering approach is the most preferred approach to construct the coreset. Methods: During summer of 2020-21, the genetic variability of 2000 soybean germplasm accessions were assessed at University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru. The clustering approach was deployed to develop 8 core sets from the base collection based on 13 qualitative and 7 quantitative traits. The core sets were validated using various univariate and multivariate statistics to assess their representativeness of the base collection. During kharif 2021, 300 germplasm accessions (15% core size) were evaluated at two sites viz., GKVK, Bengaluru and KVK Doddaballapur, to identify trait-specific accessions from the best core set. Result: Eight core sets were developed in the current study using the SSC approach. Logarithmic sampling with preferred allocation approach-based core set of 15% size was identified as the best representative of the base collection. Many trait-specific accessions were found promising for the combination of desirable traits from the best core set suggesting their preferential use in breeding programme.