“I’m gonna git you SUC8!”

Update: Now published after peer review as “Single-gene resolution of diversity-driven overyielding in plant genotype mixtures” in Nature Communications!

We are very happy to have contributed essential resources and services to this outstanding story that has been many years in the making. Briefly, the question on the outset was: “Is the overyielding sometimes observed when strains of the same species are grown together genetically tractable (i.e. strain A monoculture = productivity X; strain B monoculture = productivity Y; strains A & B grown together = productivity Z > X or Y)?” Through relentless and rigorous analyses, our colleague Sam Wuest, then at the University of Zurich, now at Agroscope, mapped overyielding in an Arabidopsis pairing to polymorphisms at a single gene locus, the SUC8 gene. This provides proof of concept that the answer is “Yes, it is!”