Two papers on GWAS and fitness trade-off published in Nature

In collaboration with several groups from around the world, we have recently discovered a locus that underlies a major fitness trade-off between growth and disease resistance in Arabidopsis thaliana. This work was published today in Nature. An allele at the ACD6 locus that slows plant growth but at the same time makes plants resistant to a raft of pathogens is found in aobut 20% of all individuals throughout the world. Because it is so ubiquitous, it is easily picked up by genome wide association, as shown in the companion paper, also published in Nature.