Introducing a supercore collection of wild octoploid strawberries

Over the last 50 years, strawberry breeders have relied on an increasingly narrow germplasm base of domesticated strawberry germplasm to produce new cultivars. The progenitors of modern cultivated strawberry exist in native populations in North and South America and are known to contain traits and characters that would be extremely useful for modern breeding purposes. Within the last two decades over 20 collecting trips have been made to collect native octoploid strawberry germplasm in North and South America with the purpose of expanding the genetic diversity of ex situ collections. To be most useful to breeders, germplasm collections need to be wellcharacterized and readily accessible. To realize these goals, germplasm curators have identified core collections, which are subsets of the collection at large. Ideally, a core subset collection consists of the minimum number of accessions that will represent the genetic diversity of the collection with a minimum of redundancy. Herein, we describe a "supercore" collection of 38 Fragaria genotypes that have been evaluated in a replicated planting in five locations in the United States. The 38 genotypes originated from broad geographical locations and represent a wide range of horticultural and climatic attributes.