Genetic diversity and construction of core collection in Chinese wheat genetic resources

Genetic diversity among 5029 accessions representing a proposed Chinese wheat core collection was analyzed using 78 pairs of fluorescent microsatellite （SSR） primers mapped to 21 chromosomes. A stepwise hierarchical sampling strategy with priority based on 4×10^5 SSR data-points was used to construct a core collection from the 23090 initial collections. The core collection consisted of 1160 accessions, including 762 landraces, 348 modern varieties and 50 introduced varieties. The core accounts for 23.1% of the 5029 candidate core accessions and 5% of the 23090 initial collections, but retains 94.9% of alleles from the candidate collections and captures 91.5% of the genetic variation in the initial collections. These data indicate that it is possible to maintain genetic diversity in a core collection while retaining fewer accessions than the accepted standard, i.e., 10% of the initial collections captured more than 70% of their genetic diversity. Estimated genetic representation of the core constructed by preferred sampling （91.5%） is much higher than that by random sampling （79.8%）. Both mean genetic richness and genetic diversity indices of the landraces were higher than those of the modern varieties in the core. Structure and principal coordinate analysis revealed that the landraces and the modern varieties were two relatively independent subpopulaUons. Strong genetic differentiation associated with ecological environments has occurred in the landraces, but was relatively weak in the modern culUvars. In addition, a mini-core collection was constructed, which consisted of 231 accessions with an estimated 70% representation of the genetic variation from the initial collections. The mini-core has been distributed to various research and breeding institutes for detailed phenotyping and breeding of genetic introgression lines.