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Oil palm

Rival A.. 2022. In : Priyadarshan P.M. (ed.), Mohan Jain S. (ed.). Cash crops: genetic diversity, erosion, conservation and utilization. Cham : Springer, p. 251-283.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-74926-2_8

Innovative and efficient methods are required to breed the oil palm for yield maximization, in order to meet the increased global demand for vegetable oil while limiting the environmental impacts of oil palm cultivation. Breeders have been able to develop elite oil palm planting materials from an extremely narrow genetic base. Breeding the oil palm for resilience to global change requires multidisciplinary and collaborative research involving almost all disciplines related to life sciences. Research also relies on identifying genetic variation in the plant responses to stress, and this implies the exploitation of natural variation, germplasm collections, selected genitors from breeding programmes together with material of interest collected from farmers. Climate change can highly affect the photosynthetic efficiency of oil palm and thus it directly affect yield; in parallel, oil palm cultivation also influences climate change, as the environmental impact of the industry primarily concerns the conversion of tropical rainforests into plantations by both agro-industrial companies and smallholding farmers. The publication of the oil palm genome sequence has been a major breakthrough in oil palm biotechnology. Even if considerable knowledge and molecular resources had already been made available before this date, the availability of the genome sequence expedited a number of research projects ranging from genomic selection to the deciphering of key components of yield such as sex ratio or oil synthesis. Metagenomics can provide a useful bridging between genomics and environmental science, while addressing key question in the sustainable management of oil palm plantations.

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