For plant breeding, it is important to create as many combinations as possible of genetic variants within a short time to select the most suitable candidates between plants with many different characteristics. The working group of Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stich from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now developed a method for using natural variations to identify what are referred to as "highly recombinogenic individuals." They have presented their method, which has been tested using a large-scale barley experiment, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.