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 Maize is the one of the most diversity crops in the world. This genetic diversity is at the basis of maize's ability to be selected for dramatically different morphologies from its wild relative and allow it to adapt to environments throughout the world. In any two maize varieties are as different as humans are from chimps.
Since this genetic diversity had been field tested over the last million years, we use it to find useful variation for today problems. For example, maize have variation for fertilizer use efficiency, nutritional quality, flowering time, and thousands of other traits. To access this diversity, we use maize varieties that breeders have developed (breeder inbred lines), the farmers have developed (landraces), and that geneticist have developed for trait dissection (mapping populations, eg. NAM)
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