Breeding for high productivity lines via haploid technology

The potential of haploids is well understood by geneticists and plant breeders as they provide a straightforward route to produce true breeding (completely homozygous) lines. These lines may be released for commercial planting but are more often used as parental lines to produce FI hybrid crosses. FI hybrids are now the preferred planting material for a large number of crops and remain the ultimate goal for most commercial plant breeders. This is because of the spectacular yield increases in out-breeding crops which have been achieved by plant breeders when producing commercial quantities of FI hybrid seed (American maize yields). F1 hybrids developed in out-breeding species will usually exhibit some level of heterosis (hybrid vigour) and are genetically uniform: giving uniform product and allowing optimization of agronomic practices (including precision farming). F1 hybrids have not been produced in oil palm because of the difficulties in producing such material and the time involved to produce highly inbreed parental lines by conventional breeding. This would require at least six generations of selfing with a minimum generation time of four to five years. Other approaches such as anther and I or microspore culture have been attempted by several oil palm research groups but there have been no reports of any haploid production. This paper describes Sumatra Bioscience's breakthrough in developing a process to screen "off-type" oil palm germinated seed, to select candidate haploid seed, to obtain haploid seedlings and progress with producing doubled haploids. To date over 1,000 haploid genotypes have been successfully identified and their haploid status has been verified using flow cytometry. molecular markers and chromosome counts. This new practical breeding approach will result in the future release of commercial Fl hybrid oil pal", crosses and provide the oil palm industry with the potential to achieve major yield increases without the further expansion of the total area under oil palm cultivation. This process to produce Fl hybrid seed is novel but does not involve genetic modification.