A strategy for selecting diverse accessions using Principal Component Analysis from a large germplasm collection of soybean

摘要

We suggest a diversity-dependent strategy, based on Principle Component Analysis, for selecting distinct accessions/parents for breeding from a soybean germplasm collection comprising of 46,3 lines, characterized and evaluated for 10 qualitative and eight quantitative traits A sample size of six accessions included all the three states, namely low, medium and high of the individual quantitative traits, while a sample of 16-19 accessions included all the 60—64 distinct states of qualitative as well as quantitative traits Under certain assumptions, the paper also develops an expression for estimating the size of a target population for capturing maximum variability in a sample three accessions.