A practical guide to quantifying the effect of genes underlying adaptation in a mixed genomics and evolutionary ecology approach
AbstractIn adaptation studies, approaches in genomics investigate the genetic, cellular and biochemical mechanisms involved in adaptation using model organisms. In study systems such as Arabidopsis, the demand is high to test for the effect of genes which polymorphism is known on the ability of plants to cope with adverse environmental conditions. In evolutionary ecology, understanding how selection and environmental heterogeneity shape the diversity of organisms is crucial. In that regard, tools to decipher how the architecture of standing genetic variation affects the evolutionary potential of plants to adapt are required. Quantitative genetics provide a range of statistical methods that could be used to study those questions but are generally neglected as a consequence of their scary name, as for example for the pedigree based random regression method used in our approach. Here, we provide a practical guide for researchers from multiple domains who would like to use such methods. We begin by providing ...