For decades, practical limitations and cost have created a bias in plant genetic studies toward species that tolerate self pollination.An important work by Chen et al.(2021) in this issue provides key tools to overcome this bias and paves the way toward more efficient genetics and breeding in outcrossing crops.rnPlants that tolerate full or partial inbreeding can be maintained in perpetuity and increased infinitely.Conversely, outcrossing species that do not tolerate inbreeding can be difficult to study due to their genetic makeup.For instance, heterozygous individuals segregating in a population cannot be grown as replicated “genotypes,” but instead must be grown and phenotyped as individual plants.Due to the heavy influence of macro-and microenvironmental factors on the performance of most plants, studies that use phenotypes from single individuals are rarely implemented except when absolutely necessary due to time or mating system (e.g., Müller et al., 2019), with a few notable exceptions in crops (e.g., Gyawali et al., 2019).In addition to challenges surrounding phenotyping, genotyping challenges must also be overcome when studying heterozygous populations of outcrossers.For instance, quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping requires genomic segments within each individual in the mapping population to be assigned to a corresponding parent.In double haploid, recombinant-inbred, or F2 mapping populations, the mathematics behind assigning genotypes to “parent 1” or “parent 2” is trivial.But, when these parents are themselves segregating for various alleles across loci, the math becomes difficult or impossible, especially for the case of polyploids.