Abstract:Aegilops tauschii is the donor of wheat D genome and hosts abundant genetic variation in the germplasm resources. The Ae. Tauschii germplasm accessions from China which genetically differ from the resources in Middle East are an important source benefitting for the wheat improvement. In order to better protect and utilize the Ae. tauschii resources, 762 accessions collected from China were subjected for the diversity analysis using the molecular markers and the spike traits. Followed by the grouping results of SSR analysis, the candidate sets of Ae. tauschii core collection were constructed by using 10 spike morphological traits including spike width, spike length, lemma width, lemma length, glume width, glume length, grain width and grain length under different genetic distances and different sampling ratios. Four parameters including mean difference percentage (MD%), coincidence rate of range (CR%), variance difference percentage (VD%) and changeable rate of coefficient of variation (VR%) were deployed to evaluate the usability of the candidate core sets, followed by a test using principal coordinate analysis. As a result, the core collection which was constructed by Euclidean distance and LDSS method with 10% sampling ratio was able to maximize the genetic diversity of Ae. tauschii in China with the smallest number of accessions.