The Spanish Core Collection of Common Beans ( L.): An Important Source of Variability for Breeding Chemical Composition.

The Iberian Peninsula is considered as a secondary center of diversity for the common bean, and the Spanish National Plant Genetic Resources Centre's germplasm bank holds more than 3,000 Spanish accessions of L. from which a core collection of 202 landraces has been selected. In order to encourage the use of this abundant resource, this study aimed to characterize genetic diversity, by measuring chemical composition in these core collections (in both the seed coat and cotyledon) using previously developed near infrared spectroscopy models.