In a paper published online in advance in PNAS this week, investigators at the University of California, Davis, "describe a unique technique for rapidly creating recombinant doubled haploid populations in Arabidopsis thaliana: centromere-mediated genome elimination." The team says its approach shows that "haploid populations offer a rapid, easy alternative to RILs [recombinant inbred lines] for Arabidopsis genetic analysis."