Crop improvement studies based on molecular approaches in interspecific Oil palm hybrids

Abstract

Oil Palm (OP) is the crop with the highest oil yield per hectare and as a result, its use has spread rapidly in tropical regions of Asia, Africa and America. The main OP plantations consist of Elaeis guineensis (Eg) species, known to produce high amounts of oil. However, in American regions this species is being affected by the ¿Pudrición de Cogollo¿ disease leading to dead palms. Therefore, OP companies started crossing this species with E. oleifera (Eo) palms which is resistant to this disease. The obtained interspecific hybrids show interesting characteristic inherited from both parents; resistance to different diseases, interesting oil quality characteristics, competitive oil production and decreased height which prolongs its useful life. However, little work has been done in the improvement of these hybrids. This thesis tries to address this gap applying different molecular approaches. First, an extensive study of an amplicon of the ¿Shell-thickness¿ (Sh) gene has been conducted on 568 Eg, Eo and hybrid genotypes. Then, with the aim to discover promising new Candidate Genes (CG) that could be exploited in further molecular assisted selection systems (MAS) a large phenotypic study of 25 production and quality traits have been performed within 198 hybrid genotypes fllowed by two Association Mapping (AM) assays. These latter have been based on targeted CG and random Restriction site associated RNA sequencing(RARSeq) approaches.