Proceedings of an Advisory Group meeting, Vienna, 17–21 November 1986. The need for plant produced industrial raw materials, as well as the fact that more and more people depend upon fewer and fewer plant species for their food, led scientists to consider the possibility of domesticating additional plant species, i.e. changing hitherto not cultivated plant species into crop plants. As spontaneous single gene mutations contributed substantially to domestication, experimental mutagenesis appears to be a promising tool to accelerate the process of domestication in new crop plants. The purpose of the meeting was to consider the possibilities and limitations of induced mutation technology for the purpose of domestication, to discuss the methodology, identify target species and define the character changes required.