Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2007
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 463 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.