Omics—A Potential Tool for Oil Palm Improvement and Productivity

Palm oil is one of the major sources of edible oils and oleochemical feedstocks. Sustainable oil palm cultivation which is set to boost production requires effective and innovative strategies. There is a continuous effort to increase the yield and productivity of the oil palm through conventional breeding and by cloning super planting materials. Hitherto, oil palm breeders had limited choice of tools to evaluate the important traits of the palm such as resistance to diseases which has constrained the breeding programme. Genomics-based technologies have sped up the process. Post-genomics tools such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics are well-established technologies and have been used as phenotyping tools to elucidate the mechanisms involved in fruit ripening and fatty acid synthesis, all of which promise to facilitate and speed up the pace of oil palm improvement. Oil palm diseases also have major economic repercussions for the oil palm industry. Progress in omics studies aimed to advance the knowledge in plant-pathogen interactions is discussed, and the process of discovering novel biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets may be shortened using proteomic and metabolomic approaches. Information and the discoveries from these studies have opened the door for the development of an oil palm omics database, which gathers proteome and metabolome data for studies of oil palm systems biology.