Analysis of flowering dynamics heritability in the perennial warm‐season grass Paspalum dilatatum

Abstract

Understanding the flowering cycles of perennial warm‐season grass species may be very important to the design of management practices and breeding. However, developmental dynamics are not well understood. As most plant traits associated with flowering dynamics do not follow a normal distribution, the use of general linear models to describe and compare these variables might be misleading. The aims of this study were (i) to find a methodology to compare panicle accumulation curves and (ii) to estimate heritabilities for flowering curve attributes. Panicle counts were recorded during a complete flowering cycle on a diverse collection of dallisgrass (Paspalum dilatatum). We compared the efficiency of different linear mixed models based on whole plot or individual plant data; then, we adjusted nonlinear regression curves for individual plants to estimate several curve attributes and compared this approach to the area under the curve. Finally, we calculated the broad‐sense heritabilities of the estimated curve parameters. The following reproductive curve attributes were obtained: panicle production potential, panicle accumulation rate and days until 3, 5, 10 and 15 panicles. We found that monitoring individual plants is more efficient when studying flowering attributes. Significant differences among genotypes for several flowering cycle attributes were found. Heritabilities were very high for all flowering cycle initiation and duration attributes. We also showed that the number of days until the emergence of a given low number of panicles can be used as a highly heritable measure to characterize flowering cycles.

Seed yield and quality of interspecific hybrids of Paspalum plicatulum × P. guenoarum at different harvest times

“…The results obtained by Barrios et al. (2015) for P. dilatatum corroborate ours, in which >80% of the variation obtained was genetic for panicle production curves. However, although this is considered the main component of SY for warm‐season perennial grasses (Lopes & Franke, 2011), it did not ( p = 0.66) influence PSY in this study.…”

“…For Paspalum dilatatum , Barrios et al. (2015) found >80% heritability for panicle production curves. However, although this is considered the main component of SY for warm‐season perennial grasses (Lopes & Franke, 2011), it did not ( p = 0.66) influence PSY in this study.…”

Breeding for reduced seed dormancy to domesticate new grass species

“…Most dallisgrass cultivars are apomictic pentaploids that were chosen from wild accessions (Acuña et al, 2019). Although important advances have been made in our understanding of the phenology of flowering and seed production dynamics in the species (González Barrios et al, 2016;Casalás et al, 2023), the available cultivars do not represent any specific advances in traits related to seed dormancy which restrict its productive adoption. Several efforts were made to increase genetic variability, such as hybridization, mutagenesis and transgenesis (Vaio et al, 2007;Giordano et al, 2014), but none has resulted in a released cultivar.…”

Forage biomass, soil cover, stability and competition in perennial grass–legume pastures with different Paspalum species

“…These species also differ in seed recruitment. P. dilatatum has low germination and seedling establishment (Laterra et al ., ) although germination and other reproductive features differ among genotypes (Glison et al ., ; González Barrios et al ., ). In contrast, P. notatum (cv.…”