Plants show enormous variety in traits relevant to breeding, such as plant height, yield and resistance to pests. One of the greatest challenges in modern plant research is to identify the differences in genetic information that are responsible for this variation. A research team led by the "Crop Yield" working group at the Institute for Molecular Physiology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and at Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne (MPIPZ), together with the Carnegie Institution of Science at Stanford, has now developed a method to identify precisely these special differences in genetic information. Using the example of maize, they demonstrate the great potential of their method in the journal Genome Biology and present regions in the maize genome that may help to increase yields and resistance to pests during breeding.