Research Update

Recent and Noteworthy Developments in the PSU Turfgrass Breeding and Genetics Program

By David R. Huff, Chris Benson, and Matt Sheltra, Dept of Plant Science, Pennsylvania State University

Notable accomplishments by the Turfgrass Breeding and Genetics Program in 2020 include:

• Award of a $268K portion of a $4.3 million multi-institutional grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to develop tools for genomics-assisted breeding in polyploid specialty crops. Participants include life scientists across the US and Europe, South America, and New Zealand.

• Receipt of a $10K Tree-of-Life Award from Dovetail Genomics (Scotts Valley, CA) to sequence the buffalograss genome. Through subsequent collaboration with University of Nebraska scientists, we successfully parlayed that award into a further $20K grant necessary to complete the approximate 430 million nucleotide base sequencing. Buffalograss typifies the American shortgrass prairie region more than any other native plant species.

• The discovery that greens-type Poa annua is capable of remembering whether it is being mowed or not and can pass along these memories to its seed progeny. This exciting discovery, i.e. that a turfgrass that can remember imposed culture, was published in Crop Science (Benson, C.L., Q. Mao, and D.R. Huff. 2020. Global DNA methylation predicts epigenetic reprogramming and transgenerational plasticity in Poa annua L. https://doi. org/10.1002/csc2.20337)

• Successful entry of three experimental creeping bentgrass varieties into the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program’s 2020 putting green trial, a 5-yr evaluation conducted at 19 locations across the US.