Rhodes grass (Chloris gayana Kunth) is an important tropical C4 grass widely used throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. It is a polymorphic, high yielding and good quality forage grass that can grow in a wide range of agro-ecologies with no known economically important biotic constraint. It is a drought and saline tolerant crop that can be grown in areas where salinity and recurrent drought are the challenge for feed production and availability for sustainable livestock production.

A subset of Rhodes grass was developed using 1,000 informative SNP markers. The markers were selected from a large set of marker data that have been generated and identified during in-depth diversity and population structure analyses of Rhodes collection in ILRI Genebank. The developed subset contains 20 % of the accessions and is representative of the genetic diversity in the collection. Analysis of molecular variance showed that there was no significant variation between the developed subset and the rest of the collection in term genetic diversity. The developed subset could be used as entry to evaluate under multilocation trial and maximize the use of the collection for sustainable livestock production for smallholder farmers in tropical and subtropical regions.