2008 Joint Annual Meeting (5-9 Oct. 2008): Testing PCR Amplification of Bermudagrass DNA with Mircosatellite Primers from Sorghum.

Bermudagrass (Cynodon sp.) is a warm-season, perennial species widely used for turf and forage in the southern United States and other warm regions in the world. The objective of this study was to test by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification the transferability of sorghum, Sorghum bicolor (L.), simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker primers to bermudagrass genomic DNA. Genomic DNA samples from three bermudagrass accessions [C. transvaalensis Burtt-Davy ‘T577’ (2n=2x=18), C. dactylon (L.) Pers. ‘Zebra’ (2n=4x=36), and C. dactylon (L.) Pers. ‘Tifton 10’ (2n=6x=54)], and one sorghum accession ‘Westland A Line’ as a control, were extracted with Zymo Research, Plant/Seed DNA Extraction Kit. These DNA samples were PCR amplified and screened using 354 sorghum genomic SSR primer pairs with two replications. Amplified PCR products were visualized using a Li-Cor 4300 DNA Analyzer. Primer pairs were scored as a band being present or absent. Sixty-two percent (62%) of the sorghum primers amplified reproducible bands for the African bermudagrass accession T577, 34% for Tifton 10, and 32% for Zebra. The Westland A Line DNA was amplified with 88% of the primers. This investigation indicated that sorghum SSR primer pairs are an efficient source of molecular markers for bermudagrass.