Sampling a Core Collection of Island Cotton (Gossypium barbadense L.) Based on the Genotypic Values of Fiber Traits

A genetic model, including effects of environments, genotypes, and genotype by environment interaction, was employed to analyze five fiber traits of Island cotton (Gossypium barbadense L.). Genotypic values of 304 accessions were predicted by the adjusted unbiased prediction (AUP). Genetic similarities between different accessions were measured by Mahalanobis distances based on genotypic values. Appropriate sampling strategies, linkage rules in stepwise clustering, and sampling proportion were evaluated. To form a core collection of Island cotton, 60 accessions were sampled by the deviation sampling strategy combined with single linkage rule of hierarchical clustering. The genetic variation and structure captured by the core collection were examined in means, variances, ranges and coefficients of variation, correlation coefficients of quantitative traits, and the accessions distribution plotted by first two principal components between two collections. It was showed that the initial collection was well represented by the core collection for exploiting the Island cotton germplasm. These authors contributed equally to this work.