Having spent most of my life in Academia teaching and carrying out fundam- tal research on plant form and function, I found this collection of essays to be of considerable interest as they expanded my knowledge of genomics to plants - yond the well-studied model systems of Arabidopsis, rice, and temperate maize. It was even more valuable to me in terms of my more recent interest in international agriculture--in particular, my personal interest in promotingthe integration of - ings from the advanced plant sciences into current approaches to crop impro- ment for the bene t of poor, small-scale...