Biotechnological Approaches in Producing Oil Palm Planting Material – A Success Story

Success in cloning oil palms was first reported by Jones (1974) and Rabechault and Martin, (1976). Results from successful field trials followed in the late seventies. Realising the huge yield potential of cloning and planting of elite clones, Malaysian plantation companies including Applied Agricultural Resources Sdn. Bhd. (AAR) commenced their tissue culture programmes in the early eighties. By the mid 1980s there were 10 clonal oil palm laboratories in Malaysia (Wooi, 1990) and others elsewhere (Le Guen et al., 1991). The euphoria was dampened by the first report by Corley et al (1986), on mantling phenomenon that affected the reproductive structures and yield of clonal oil palms after which all laboratories reverted back to research and development. In a span of more than 20 years of research at AAR we concentrated on fine tuning the tissue culture processes in conjunction with experimental clonal plantings in 1990 and large scale commercial plantings in 1997. With the successful performances of our commercial plantings, we are now forging ahead with the recent commissioning of our new state of the art tissue culture laboratory of 4800m² and commercial nursery of 0.5 ha. These have a capacity for 1.5 million ramet production annually. Mantled somaclonal variants still occur in the tissue culture process however the problem can be circumvented with better management of cultures. Thus it is possible to produce oil palm clones commercially by keeping the mantling level to less than 5% (Corley and Stratford et al., 1998. Wong et al., 1999. Ho et al., 2006). With the success in recloning, the issue of insufficient ortets has been overcome. Our commercial production utilizes both ortets and reclones and a combination of gelled culture system and liquid suspension system.