Buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris L.) is an important forage grass widely grown across the world with many good characteristics including high biomass yield, drought tolerance, and adaptability to a wide range of soil conditions and agro-ecologies. This core collection, containing 20% of accessions in the collection, is representative of the diversity of the buffelgrass collection in the ILRI genebank. It contains germplasm materials from 11 different countries and from different cluster groups as revealed by cluster analysis.

Resources (labor, time, and space) are limited to use the whole collection of species in Genebank for research and development. To enhance the use and distribution of germplasm of buffelgrass in the Genebank, a core collection was developed using genotyping-by-sequencing data. A genome-wide 1000 informative SNP markers, identified during diversity and population structure analyses, were used.