Our statistically powerful and flexible modelling approach can distinguish between multiple drivers of resource occupancy: measurable factors (environmental conditions and resource traits), unmeasurable (hidden or unknown) factors, previous use of the resource (memory effect) and community-level interactions.
Compared with monogenic or oligogenic traits, therefore, these polygenic traits are extremely difficult for breeders and pathologists to manage [ 21]. Isolation of QTLs, especially major QTLs, may simplify the analysis of quantitative traits and provide important resources for trait improvements.
By leveraging genomic resources, genetic traits underlying those mechanisms will become important resources to design plants selecting and hosting beneficial microbial communities.
Our study revealed distinct changes in resource-use trait composition and complex patterns in the relationship between species richness and functional richness.
Thus, we could assume that melanins would be not a limited resource for trait building such as carotenoids.
αij is the competition coefficient, which is a function of the difference in the resource utilization trait, u, between two individual consumers or between consumer species.
We also assume that the resource utilization trait u affects both a consumer's vulnerability to the predator and competition among individual consumers and/or consumer species.
Indeed, since males tend to gain fitness largely through reproductive competition and females through enhanced longevity, it is predicted that males might invest less in costly immune mechanisms in order to divert resources into traits that enhance competitive ability [9], [10].
Perceiving the social environment during development, juveniles can allocate the resources into traits suitable for the environment.
In the context of selection based on good-genes, sperm competitive ability is defined as the investment in traits that influence a male's ability to win fertilizations in conditions of sperm competition, under the assumption that males of higher genetic quality can allocate more resources to traits involved in sperm competition [ 9].
