When we are notified of an interesting marker for a trait of potential importance, it is our goal to validate these in a practical, real breeding/farming situation. To do this we search for NILs in our breeding lines…closely related lines which either have or don’t have the marker. Then we can measure the trait in these NILs and see if there really is a difference when the material is under field conditions. We are busy taking leaf samples at the moment and sending them to our laboratory in Germany for analysis. Soon we will be testing all of our early generation material for validated markers so we can move forward with the traits that matter and discard any without potential.