'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 CORE SELECTION TO ENHANCE GERMPLASM UTILISATION THAT MEET SPECIFIC USERS NEEDS V. MAHALAKSHMI, T.J.L. VAN HINTUM, R. ORTIZ IITA, Oyo Road, PMB5320, Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria

Accessibility and knowledge of gene bank collections are essential factors for an efficient use of the genetic resources. Core collections improve the sampling while selecting accessions from a germplasm collection. We develop a core selector programme that allows the user to choose the domain of interest and provides a tool to create focused selection of the germplasm but with broad representation of diversity within the selection. Traditionally the germplasm data contains both non-parametic qualitative and quantitative descriptors. For the parametric trait the user can choose the number of groups (between 5 to 20). The size of core selection is to be given between 1 and 10 % of the total collection size. The allocation over groups is based on either proportional or logarithmic sampling strategy, with minimum of one for the small groups.