Development of a Multipurpose Core Collection of Bread Wheat Based on High-Throughput Genotyping Data

Abstract

Modern plant breeding practices have narrowed the genetic base of wheat throughout the world, increasing crop vulnerability. Therefore, there is clearly a need for introducing new germplasm in breeding programs to search for variability related to traits of agronomic interest for wheat improvement. The existence of subsets of accessions (core collections) that represent the diversity conserved in germplasm collections is a favored approach for breeders to explore novel variation and enhance the use of germplasm. In this study, a core collection of Spanish landraces of bread wheat has been created using high-throughput genotyping technologies (DArTseq), which yielded more than 50 K molecular markers. This marker system not only provides a robust estimate of the diversity, but also information about its distribution in the genome. Two core collections of 94 entries were created by using two common sampling strategies: the maximization strategy and the population structure-based method. Both core collections showed high geographic, phenotypic and genetic representativeness, but the collection obtained with the maximization strategy captured better the diversity displayed by the initial collection. This core collection, which includes a broad range of adapted genotypes, can be efficiently utilized for mining new alleles for useful traits in wheat breeding.