I am pleased to introduce this special issue of Plant Genetic Resources, which includes a cross-section of reports presented at the third GPGR Symposium, held in South Korea in April 2013. My particular thanks go to the guest editor Suk-Ha Lee and his team of Scott Jackson, Roberto Tuberosa and Rajeev Varshney for assembling and editing this collection of some 40 papers which capture the current state-of-the-art in plant genetic resources research. The journal has benefited from the success of the 2011 special issue (volume 9) which reported on GPGR2, and I am sure that this current special issue will be equally well received by both the readership and the authorship of the journal. I hope that my successor as Editor of Plant Genetic Resources will continue the tradition of offering a platform for the outcomes of this seminal run of symposia.