Bermudagrass Basics: The Foundations for a Breeding Program.

Bermudagrass (Cyanodon dactylon) is the most important warm-season perennial grass in the Southeastern United States. Bermudagrass is widely used because of its high yield, persistence, ability to dry quickly for hay production, a tolerance to drought conditions, and a dramatic response to nitrogen fertilization. Even with its popularity, cultivar development for forage bermudagrass is low compared to the demand. A collaborative project spanning four states (Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and North Carolina) was established along with a collection of 300 bermudagrass accessions. The entries used in the project were gathered from two different sources, Tifton CORE collection and the USDA Grin collection. The traits of interest collected from field experiments were: leaf height, plant coverage, stolon length, stolon number, flowering, bermudagrass stem maggot (BSM), disease, nitrogen content, fresh weight yield, and dry weight yield, One of the challenges of using these collections is the lack of basic genetic information required to perform modern breeding. The objective of this project was to estimate basic genetic information (i.e. ploidy, and genetic parameters) in order for this breeding program to be successful carried out. This poster will illustrate how flow cytometry was used to estimate ploidy level for each individual accession of the collection. Additionally, we used linear mixed models to estimate the correlation between the ploidy level and the traits of interest. Finally we used linear mixed models to estimate the genetic parameters for all traits of interest. This new breeding program can utilize the information found in these results by making informed parental crosses that take advantage of the genetic values estimated. Our program is dedicated to providing high quality products to the forage producers in the Southeastern United States.