What are your thoughts, and what papers do you think make a good point for or against this idea?
Cheers for the reply Maggie! I will have to look up those examples you gave.
One of the things I'm really interested in is whether we really can explain complex ecological processes at the level of genes. We know that organisms interact via phenotypes, which are encoded by genotypes, but how much variation in ecological interactions between organisms and their environment, or, arguably more interesting, between organism A and organism B?
Will we really find large--and significant--correlations in interspecific genotypes in future large-scale community-level genomics studies?
Genomics is getting more and more importan in population ecology and community ecology-seee.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225634640_The_potential_of_a_population_genomics_approach_to_analyse_geographic_mosaics_of_plant--insect_coevolution
Article The potential of a population genomics approach to analyse g...
Genomics could rely upon cultivated clonal cultures, early environmental gene sequencing cloned specific genes (often the 16S rRNA gene) to produce a profile of diversity in environmental samples, thus giving an insight into varieties making up communities.
I think genomics has the potential to provide a lot of new information, for example about mechanisms of plant response to insect attack... which could be compared between genotypes / environmental conditions to understand which genes affect the pathways involved in differential plant response to insects. Several 'omics techniques give snapshots of what is happening (i.e. they show gene expression at a given moment in time), so several sampling time points are needed. To make it work, my advice is hypothesis led experiments that produce genomics data for modelling changes in gene expression over time in response to the interacting species (e.g. insect,) are needed.
I am not certain whether genomics is relevant in understanding community ecology or not but I, personally, think that knowledge in this field is supplementary, especially in assessment of biodiversity and interactions of organisms. It is through this field of study that genes that are relevant to the adaptations of organisms in a community are assessed. These adaptations could arise from different factors, an example of which is character displacement, which is under Community Ecology.
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