An impressive collection of more than 2,000 inbred lines is currently stored in Romania's seed banks. It is a "hidden treasure" worth investigating. Its uniqueness lies in the long history of breeding and selection that has chiselled its genetic substrate since the 14th century, when the Turks introduced maize to Romania. The funding attracted to date has enabled us to reveal the richness of this collection. As we show in our paper (Suteu et al., 2013, PLoS One), due to the allelic richness, the inbred lines that have been investigated represent an important addition to the ever-dwindling gene pool faced by breeding programmes. With this project proposal we aim to investigate the potential of 1,200 maize lines by understanding their genetic substrate using state-of-the-art techniques in molecular biology: genotyping-by-sequencing (RAD-seq) and complex bioinformatics analysis workflows. The addition of these 1,200 lines to our genotyping efforts will give a powerful boost to the predictive capacity in genetic improvement of this crop plant. As a consequence, we will be able to advise breeders in their efforts to produce superior hybrids more adapted to the current needs of society. This could have important implications for the Romanian economy, as the country ranks well below the EU average for average yield per hectare (four tonnes vs. six tonnes).