Photothermal controls of vegetative dormancy in Poa secunda
Date
2022-03
Authors
Chen, Allen A.
Fei, Shui‐zhang
Moore, Kenneth J.
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John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. on behalf of Chinese Grassland Society and Lanzhou University
Abstract
Background: Summer vegetative dormancy is a desirable trait in cool‐season grasses when they are interplanted with annual crops. Sandberg bluegrass (Poa secunda J. Presl.) shows summer dormancy, but the environmental cues that control dormancy remain unknown.
Methods: A controlled environment study using temperature and day length combinations of 32.2°C/15 h, 26.6°C/14 h, 21.1°C/13 h, and 15.5°C/12 h was conducted with P. secunda accessions PI232347, PI639272, and PI232348, and
‘Audubon’ red fescue as a nondormant control to determine the optimum treatment for dormancy induction. A second study using treatments of 26.6°C/14 h, 21.1°C/13 h, and 15.5°C/12 h was conducted to determine the thresholds for dormancy release. A third study used a factorial experiment with two temperatures (32.2°C and 15.5°C) and two day lengths (15 and 12 h) to differentiate between temperature and day length effects on dormancy induction.
Results: Of the four temperature and day length combinations, all except for 15.5°C/12 h resulted in dormancy by the end of 6 weeks, with 32.2°C/15 h inducing dormancy in only 17 days. Of the three treatments for dormancy release, 15.5°C/12 h broke dormancy the fastest in all accessions and released the most number of plants from dormancy. Considerable variation existed between accessions for the speed of dormancy release in the 21.1°C/13 h and 26.6°C/14 h treatments. The third study showed that temperature is the primary inducer for summer dormancy, while longer day length may promote dormancy under inductive temperatures.
Conclusions: This study identified the optimum photothermal for induction and release of summer dormancy in P. secunda, which will help future studies in elucidating the mechanism of summer dormancy.
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This article is published as Chen, Allen A., Shui‐zhang Fei, Andrew W. Lenssen, and Kenneth J. Moore. "Photothermal controls of vegetative dormancy in Poa secunda." Grassland Research 1 (2022): 43-52. doi:10.1002/glr2.12008. © 2022 The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.