An impressive collection of more than 2,000 maize inbred lines is currently being preserved in Romanian seed banks. It’s a “hidden treasure” worth investigating. Its uniqueness resides in the long-standing history of breeding and selection processes that have shaped the genetic background of the germplasm to its current form since the 16th century, when the Turks introduced it to Romania. The funding we had already secured has helped us uncover the allelic richness of this collection and its tremendous potential in breeding programs worldwide. As we point out in our article (Suteu et al., 2013, PLoS One), due to their allelic richness, the inbred lines we have investigated are important additions to the ever-shrinking gene pool, which breeding programs are faced-with nowadays. In the present proposal we plan to unlock the full potential of 1,200 inbred lines by probing their genetic make-up using state of the art molecular biology tools such as Genotyping-by-Sequencing (RAD-seq) and elaborated bioinformatic pipelines. Adding 1,200 inbred lines to our genotyping efforts will boost our predictive breeding power. Consequently, we’ll be able to advise breeders in their efforts to create superior hybrids, which are more amenable to nowadays-societal needs. This could have important implications for the Romanian economy, considering that the country is scoring well below the E.U. average in terms of yield (four vs. six metric tons per hectare).