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Molecular approaches for improving oil palm for oil

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Abstract

The oil palm, originating from Africa, is the most productive oil crop species. Palm oil is an important source of edible oil. Its current global plantation area is over 23 million ha. The theoretical oil yield potential of the oil palm is 18.2 tons/ha/year. However, current average oil yield is only 3.8 tons/ha/year. In the past 100 years, conventional breeding and improvement of field management played important roles in increasing oil yield. However, conventional breeding for trait improvement was limited by its very long (10–20 years) phenotypic selection cycle, although it improved oil yield by ~10–20% per generation. Molecular breeding using novel molecular technologies will accelerate genetic improvement and may reduce the need to deforest and to use arable land for expanding oil palm plantations, which in turn makes palm oil more sustainable. Here, we comprehensively synthesize information from relevant literature of the technologies, achievements, and challenges of molecular approaches, including tissue culture, haploid breeding, mutation breeding, marker-assisted selection (MAS), genomic selection (GS), and genome editing (GE). We propose the characteristics of ideal palms and suggest a road map to breed ideal palms for sustainable palm oil.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the internal fund of the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (Funding ID: 9200). We thank our lab members for comments on the manuscript before submitting. We are very grateful to all authors who published papers on the oil palm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Molecular Population Genetics and Breeding Group, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, 1 Research Link, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117604, Singapore

    Gen Hua Yue, Bao Qing Ye & May Lee

  2. School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 6 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637551, Singapore

    Gen Hua Yue

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Gen Hua Yue

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  1. Gen Hua Yue
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  2. Bao Qing Ye
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  3. May Lee
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GHY initiated the project “Molecular Breeding of the oil palm” GHY, ML, and BQY collected all the references and drafted the manuscript. GHY finalized the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Gen Hua Yue.

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Yue, G.H., Ye, B.Q. & Lee, M. Molecular approaches for improving oil palm for oil. Mol Breeding 41, 22 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-021-01218-z

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