The development of core collections and their role in association mapping

When developed from a large collection, a core collection should include the more locally common trait associations that have accumulated over the evolution of the species. Also, in a core collection of any species the main parameters comprise genetic distance, diversity, coverage based on common alleles, and the number of selected samples as well as practicability, computation time, and accuracy. This particularly applies in core collections where entries were chosen to maximize allelic richness with minimum size most likely causing maximum linkage disequilibrium. Methods for developing a core collection, such as the M strategy, assist in obtaining maximum numbers of phenotypes.