Turfgrass Breeding 101: Screening for Stress Tolerance Dominic Petrella Postdoctoral Associate Departments of Horticultural Science and Agronomy and Plant Genetics University of Minnesota One of my roles as a postdoctoral research associate in the turfgrass science program at the University of Minnesota is helping to improve the tolerance of turfgrasses to various environmental stresses. An approach that we use to make these improvements is to select for top-performing plants under specific stresses that can then be used to generate new cultivars. It can seem
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straight forward, but often times it can get complicated. First, I’ll present a general outline of how we can select plants with tolerance to a defined stress, and second, I’ll walk through a specific example involving selecting turfgrasses for improved growth under tree shade – a complicated example of selection for stress tolerance.