Undoubtedly, African Oryza genetic resources have numerous traits of potential value in the improvement of cultivated rice.
These species have potential for domestication in some cases but also have many traits of potential value in the improvement of domesticated rice.
Therefore, ecosystem degradation could affect the net balance of plant-plant interactions, which can also depend on the functional traits of potential nurse species.
The results highlight the importance of obtaining basic knowledge of husbandry requirements and baseline information on life-history traits of potential test species prior to designing toxicity test protocols.
For the partitioning traits, even if no parental difference was observed, transgressive segregation among the RILs was important, making these traits of potential interest in further populations for drought improvement in common bean.
To further compare inferences from both gene expression technologies we investigated the expression of genes involved in glucosinolate metabolism, cold tolerance and flowering as these are traits of potential adaptive significance in the divergence of both species.
This observation suggests that microbial-derived traits of potential benefit to young Zea plants are not dependent on soils as microbial donors but rather can be supplied by vertical transmission.
Modern genetic approaches have increased the value of these resources as quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping, association studies, and molecular population genetic studies have combined to uncover specific alleles associated with traits of potential value for crop improvement (Ross-Ibarra et al. 2007; Takeda and Matsuoka 2008).
Consistent with this result, 17 microbial-derived traits of potential benefit to young Z. mays plants were observed from microbes isolated from plants grown on sterilized sand, and hence plants could potentially obtain these traits without depending on soils as donors.
The application of QTL information for these traits is of potential interest in marker-assisted selection since these traits have sex-limited expression, and are potentially difficult to measure, thus limiting the rate of progress under conventional mass selection.
