Many of the world’s minor crops have traits that deserve more detailed study, but are often not investigated because of these orphan crops’ low commercial status in the developed world. Such traits include the unmatched calcium content of finger millet grain, the invigorating novelty of the holly leaf beverages yaupon tea and yerba mate, or the high vitamin content of numerous endemics. Genetics, and its high throughput technology called genomics, provides a strategy to open up these minor crops for study and improvement. This research has the potential to both improve the target minor crop and also major crops, for instance via transfer of superior traits from the orphan into major crop, such as superior protein content into maize kernels and/or superior mineral content into rice. This proposed Concurrent Symposium will focus on minor crops that are acquiring or have recently acquired full genome sequence analysis as a first set of genomic tools, now followed by more informed physiological studies (e.g., by metabolomics, transcriptomics or comparative biology in model systems). Hence, the workshop will not be about genomes per se, but rather presenting examples of how genome information is being used to improve the quality and yield of minor crops, and how some of these traits are being employed for improvement of the world’s most important crops.