What is Core Hunter?

Core Hunter is a flexible tool to sample diverse, representative subsets from large germplasm collections, with minimum redundancy. Such so-called core collections have applications in plant breeding and genetic resource management in general. Core Hunter can construct cores based on genetic marker data, phenotypic traits or precomputed distance matrices, optimizing one of many provided evaluation measures depending on the precise purpose of the core (e.g. high diversity, representativeness, or allelic richness). In addition, multiple measures can be simultaneously optimized as part of a weighted index to bring the different perspectives closer together.

Version 3 has been recoded from scratch using the JAMES framework which provides the applied optimization algorithms.

Getting started with Core Hunter

Core Hunter is available in 3 flavours.

• For most users we recommend the desktop version.
• For users looking to include CoreHunter in analytical pipelines we recommend the R version.
• For Java programmers, you can include Core Hunter in your code as a library, extend Core Hunter or even become a contributor. For you the starting point is Github.

Core Hunter is implemented in Java. In any case you will need to have installed a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 8 or later.

User group

For the latest information on Core Hunter please subscribe to the user group.

Data formats

Information about the supported data file formats is available here.

Evaluation measures

Information about the supported evaluation measures is available here.

Version 2.0 website

Looking for the old Core Hunter 2 website? It’s here.