Linking plant genes to arthropod community dynamics: current progress and future challenges

Plant genetic variation can play a key role in shaping ecological communities. Prior work investigated the effects of coarse-grain variation among plant genotypes on their diverse arthropod communities. Several recent studies, however, have leveraged the boom of genomic resources to study how genome-wide plant variation influences associated communities. These studies have demonstrated that the effects of plant genomic variation are not just detectable but can be important drivers of arthropod communities in natural ecosystems. Field common gardens and lab-based mesocosm experiments are also revealing candidate genes that have large effects on arthropod communities. While we highlight these exciting results, we also discuss key challenges to address in future research. We argue that a major hurdle lies in the integration of genomic tools with hierarchical models of species communities (HMSCs). HMSCs are generative models that provide the opportunity to not only better understand the processes underlying community change but to also predict community dynamics. We also advocate for future research to apply models of genomic prediction to explore the genetic architecture of arthropod community phenotypes. We hypothesize that this genetic architecture will follow an exponential distribution, where a few genes of large effect, but also many genes of small effect, contribute to variation in arthropod communities. The next generation of studies linking plant genes to community dynamics will require interdisciplinary collaborations to build truly predictive models of plant genetic and arthropod community change.