SELECTION OF A CORE COLLECTION FROM THE UNITED-STATES GERMPLASM COLLECTION OF PEANUT

The U.S. germplasm collection for peanut, Arachis hypogaea L., consist s of 7432 accessions and contains a great amount of genetic diversity. Information on economically important traits does not exist for most accessions due to the time and labor required for evaluation. The deve lopment of a core collection for peanut would provide a subset of acce ssions that are representative of the entire collection and that could be extensively examined. The objective of this research was to select a core collection for peanut. Data for the U.S. peanut germplasm coll ection were obtained from the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). The entire germplasm collection was then stratified by country of origin and by the amount of available morphological data. When inf ormation was available for at least four of the same morphological var iables for at least 16 accessions from the same country of origin, the n the data for these accessions were analyzed using multivariate stati stical analysis. Results allowed the accessions to be clustered into g roups which, theoretically, are genetically similar. Random sampling w as then used to select almost-equal-to 10% from each group. Accessions with inadequate data for multivariate analysis were selected using a 10% random sample from each country of origin. Accessions from countri es having few (less-than-or-equal-to 5) entries in the collection were pooled and a 10% random sample was selected. The resulting 831 access ions form a core collection for peanut. Examination of data for six ph enotypic traits indicated that the genetic variation expressed for eac h trait in the entire collection has been preserved in this core colle ction. This peanut core collection has many potential uses and should increase the utilization of peanut germplasm resources.