Wheat is the crop most widely cultivated worldwide: Each year, more than 550 million tons of wheat are used for human food and animal feed. If conventional breeding has allowed significant advances in terms of yield and grain quality, it will not be able to face the demands for increasing global crop production in a sustainable and environmental-friendly manner. Genomics holds the key to wheat improvement, through the development of new tools and methodologies to help breeders. In particular, the generation of molecular markers offers the potential to renew some breeding methodologies in diverse ways including Linkage disequilibrium (LD) mapping. LD analyses appear very interesting to the plant genetics community for its potential to use existing genetic resources collections in order to fine map quantitative trait loci (QTL), validate candidate genes and identify alleles of interest. Recently, the field of plant association genetics pioneered the use of a new type of association populations, designed to incorporate advantages of both linkage based and linkage disequilibrium based quantitative trait dissection approaches in association studies. These new strategies issued from animal breeding are a powerful tool for fast and large scale validation of candidate genes and precise QTL dissection in plants. The NEWNAM project proposes to investigate one of theses new strategies named NAM for Nested Association Mapping population, in order to create a new powerful resource of winter bread wheat for further use in genetic studies and breeding purposes. The NEWNAM project will be developed by 2 laboratories that are recognized leaders in wheat genomics and genotyping. It aims at providing a key strategy for future wheat research areas through the development of a new biological resource for the wheat community. This high resolution mapping resource will provide researchers and breeders with a tool for integrated research driven by the phenotype.