Designing a Mini-Core Collection Effectively Representing 3004 Diverse Rice Accessions

Genetic diversity provides the foundation for plant breeding and genetic research. Over 3000 rice genomes were recently sequenced as part of the 3K Rice Genome (3KRG) Project. We added four additional Indian rice accessions to create a panel of 3004 accessions. However, such a large collection of germplasm is difficult to preserve and evaluate. The construction of core and mini-core collections is an efficient method for the management of genetic resources. In this study, we developed a mini-core comprising 520 accessions that captured most of the SNPs and represented all of the phenotypes and geographic regions from the original panel. The mini-core was validated using different statistical analyses and contained representatives from all major rice groups, including