Abstract

Food production and conservation efforts advance with the discovery and targeting of genes that quantitatively contribute to agricultural and ecological systems. Quantitative genetic methods typically establish a connection between a trait of interest and variants in a single organism's genome. Genome-to-genome mapping has recently discovered genome variants interacting between species to produce the outcome of an interaction involving several organisms (including multiple kingdoms). These were genomic interactions between bacterial pathogens and plants; plant-fungal quantitative genetics has not yet been used. Most land plants, including crop plants, have symbiotic relationships with plant-mycorrhizae, which affect a variety of properties in anything from single organisms to entire ecosystems. Understanding the genetic underpinnings of these relationships would be helpful. Due to the accessibility of Rhizophagus irregularis mycorrhizal isolates with genomic data, dual-genome approaches utilising advantageous mutualists are both immediate and accessible.