Utilisation of oil palm genetic resources at Dami oil palm research station

The foundation of the Dami breeding program is based on the germplasm populations selected in the H&C breeding program at Banting in 1968. Intensive progeny testing in these populations has resulted in the selection of the best dura and pisifera sources and their multiplication for seed production. The actual seed production concentrates on selected dura from the Deli families planted in the successive seed garden and on the pollen collected from five elite pisifera selected in the DM742 family of AVROS origin.The general layout of the breeding program at Dami aims at maximizing the scope for both short-term and long-term improvements in total palm product yields. These two objectives have different constraints and require different approaches, which are addressed separately in the breeding programme.The short-term improvement objective is to ensure maximum progress within the current and following breeding generation, e.g. within the next ten years. It relies on the systematic approach of the Reciprocal Recurrent Selection method to identify the new generation of parental palms and essentially aims to exploit the variability still remaining in the Deli and AVROS populations already used for seed production. In order to maximise the chances forall sources of improvement are being exploited at the various levels' of selection:. In the seed garden, a high selection intensity is applied to choose the aura for seedproduction. This is encouraged by the remarkable relationship found between the characters transmitted by dura parents to their dura selfs or tenera progenies. Good heritability figures are also found for most selection characters, provided the individual palm data are compiled from a sufficient number of observations.. Much effort and resources are allocated to large scale progeny testing of dura and pisifera, following crossing designs which allow the calculation of reliable parental combining abilities. A large number of parents are being tested to increase the chances of finding duraand pisifera combining the most desirable characteristics. Thus, in 1997 and 1998, 550progenies have been planted in trials testing 213 Deli dura and 94 Avros pisifera.The exploitation of specific combining abilities is the objective of one of the latest progenytesting programs, the Candidate Clonal Parent Trial or CCPT program. This set of trials istesting 20 dura crossed in all combinations with five pisifera and aims to reproduce the bestprogenies from the dura clones or selfs. The trials have also been planted in differentcountries to test the genotype x environment (GxE) effects.