A HUGE GOAL FOR THE OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY TURFGRASS BREEDING AND RESEARCH PROGRAM
By Suz Trusty
Editor’s Note: Tis is the fourth in a series of articles covering university reports on their turfgrass breeding and research programs. If your University is involved in turfgrass breeding, please contact
suztrusty@TurfGrassSod.org for the opportunity to feature your program in an upcoming issue of Turf News.
“We have access to so much bermudagrass germplasm collected in many locations across the world, each with an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 genes; the number of combinations is unlimited. With the technological advancements in turfgrass breeding and genetics over the last ten years, we have the opportunity to develop even better varieties for this new time. Tat’s our goal,” says Dr. Yanqi Wu.
Dr. Wu is pursuing that goal on the faculty of Oklahoma State University (OSU) as professor, Meibergen Family Professorship in Plant Breeding at the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences. His major responsibility is to provide leadership of the OSU Grass Breeding and Genetics Research Program. Current research is focused on the development of new cultivars, and genetic and genomic research on important agronomic traits in bermudagrass used for turf and forage, and switchgrass for bioenergy.
Currently, his primary focus is on bermudagrass for turf, which has a potential economic impact for the university and the state. As OSU’s Turfgrass Science website http://
turf.okstate.edu states, “Tere are approximately 163,800 square kilometers (63,244 square miles) of cultivated turfgrass in the United States. Te turfgrass industry contributes approximately $40 billion per year to the United States economy and approximately $1 billion per year to the Oklahoma economy."
Looking Back Wu visited Iowa and Minnesota in 2015 and found, in many areas, bermudagrass was considered a weed. He says, “About 80 years ago, before the bermudagrass breeding programs developed, it was considered a wily weed, very troublesome to the row crops in the southern States. Yet as early as the 1930s some scientists recognized its beautiful low mowing traits in response to Nitrogen applications. Smart people as far back as the ‘30s gathered germplasm from many locations in the world.”
He adds, “Bermudagrass was an introduced species in the United States; we think around 1700 in the southeast and about 1800 in the southwest. Following typical
TPI Turf News September/October 2016
Dr. Wu examines an early green-up bermudagrass developed in the OSU breeding program.
outcrossing reproductive behavior—with the progeny different from the parents—some progeny adapted from the new environments and moved either south or north. It’s a slow process, but it happens. While we expect to find uncultivated bermudagrasses in the southwest, southeast and south central regions of the U.S., surprisingly it has spread to many colder regions, including Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado.”
By the mid-1900s, some forage varieties of bermudagrasses had been developed and more were being researched. Plant Geneticist Dr. Glenn Burton was one of the early germplasm collectors and breeders, notably including some of the smaller grass hybrids he discovered among his forage breeding varieties in the early 1940s, while working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Georgia Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton. He saw the potential for bermudagrass for turf uses and allocated about 10 percent of his time to researching them. Tat resulted in the introduction of Tifway bermudagrass in 1960 and Tifdwarf in 1965—the cultivars which launched bermudagrass as a mainstay of the warm-season turf industry.
In the early 1960s, OSU scientists Dr. Jack Harlan and his colleagues Drs. de Wet and Huffine collected more
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