A Lablab purpureus core collection based on morphological descriptors was proposed by Pengelly and Maass (2001) and later refined with molecular markers to assess genetic diversity (Maass et al. 2005, Robotham and Chapman 2017, Table 1). The structure of the core has also been supported by a comparative analysis of population genetic data (Maass et al. 2017). Additional core collections determined afterwards based on different germplasm assessments have only focussed on accessions from Bangladesh (Islam et al. 2014) or India (Vaijayanthi et al. 2015).

In 2015 accessions were transferred from CSIRO to the Australian Pastures Genebank and given an APG accession number. This subset contains 43 out of the 51 accessions in the core and is missing eight accessions held at ILRI. Brigitte Maass (Pers. Comm. 2023) identified three accessions from the APG as substitutes for the missing accessions (Table 2), and a further three accessions (APG 50262, APG 50448, AGP 50260, (Table 3) to provide representation from East Africa and India.

A recent diversity study based on SSR markers that included large portions of the germplasm accessions held by APG and ILRI (Kongjaimun et al. 2023) identified additional diversity and has been used to add five accessions to this core collection, bringing the total number of accession in this subset to 54.

To gain a comprehensive understanding on the development of this subset and to access the aforementioned tables, we highly recommend exploring the information available in this document.