The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.; 2n = 32), an allogamous perennial monocotyledon originating from West Africa, is now primarily grown in Asia, following its introduction into Indonesia in the XIXth century, and placed second after soybean in terms of worldwide vegetable oil consumption by man. Oil palm breeding programmes are all based on a major Sh gene determining three varietal types of fruit, dura (Sh+/Sh+), tenera (Sh+/Sh-) and pisifera (Sh-/Sh-), which are the basis for creating improved tenera seeds, obtained by crossing dura x pisifera, which have the highest natural oil productivity. A general objective of a multinational project funded by the EC under the INCO-DEV program is the development of new molecular resources for molecular breeding in oil palm. This is being achieved by a massive development of microsatellite markers (SSRs), by the construction of reference high density (HD) and consensus multi-parent linkage maps for a more effective detection of worthwhile QTL and for a direct study of their effects depending on their type and the genetic base considered. The topics of this study are the results in developing 410 SSR functional primers pairs in oil palm and their use in the construction of reference and multi-parent linkages maps useful for the further detection of agronomic QTL in the species. The strategy is mainly based on full-sib families, from crosses between 8 different heterozygous parents representing 3 major genetic back-grounds (La Mé, Deli, Yangambi), connected between themselves by common parents, and tested in specific 2 X 2 complete or 4 X 4 incomplete factorial genetic designs. Dominant AFLP and co-dominant SSR markers are being used for building up the reference HD linkage map of a LM2T X DA 10D control progeny. The degree of segregating polymorphism is relatively high in the chosen map population with an average of 69% polymorphic SSR loci and of 11 AFLP fragments per primer combination. A total of 282 SSRs and of 1118 AFL