Improving plant breeding with exotic genetic libraries

Naturally occurring variation among wild relatives of cultivated crops is an under-exploited resource in plant breeding. Here, I argue that exotic libraries, which consist of marker-defined genomic regions taken from wild species and introgressed onto the background of elite crop lines, provide plant breeders with an important opportunity to improve the agricultural performance of modern crop varieties. These libraries can also act as reagents for the discovery and characterization of genes that underlie traits of agricultural value.