“…The statistical model will have the functional trait of interest as the dependent variable and the microbiome properties and environmental factors as explanatory variables (e.g. Asad et al, 2022 for yield;Cambon et al, 2022 for drought tolerance; Pérez-Valera et al, 2020 for an example of paired samples). When the microbiome contributes significantly to the functional trait of interest, identifying which microbial taxa are the main players can be done using the TITAN2 method (Baker et al, 2015) or differential abundance analysis methods (Nearing et al, 2022;Weiss et al, 2017).…”