
Molecular Breeding
Problem:
Excessive land use to increase productivity. This is resulting in unsustainable practices and degradation
of the local environment, including the marginalization of flora, fauna and local indigenous people.
Solution:
Level Growth orchestrate the international cooperation with major research institution, to develop
Molecular breeding of the local crop. The productivity of the crop is increased without increasing the
area of plantation
The first
challenge arises in identifying the best parental lines.
Choosing appropriate parents and selecting outstanding
progeny according to their phenotypic behavior are
hampered by the environmental noise that is present in
field observations for most traits are controlled by many
genes. The second challenge is its long breeding cycle.

The Problem
One cycle of selection, which includes phenotypic
evaluation of test crosses and inter-crossing of the best
palms to form the next cycle, requires approximately 19
years to complete by conventional breading methods. In
addition, oil-palm breeding is expensive not only
because of the length of time required per cycle, but
also because large planting areas are required
The Solution
The Challenge
The approach to reach this goal is to identify the codes
or DNA sequence, in oil palm genome responsible for
each of trais of interest, i.e. establish relationship
between gene sequences and phenotype. Because the
DNA sequence or code is not influenced by
environmental factors, the selection informed under the
genome information will be accurate and can also be
done when the palm is still in its seedling stage. The
process of establish relationship between gene
sequence and phenotype is the process of establishing
models through advanced genomic, bio-informatics
and bio-statistics technologies.
(GS) and genome wide association study (GWAS).
How GWAS works
As shown in the figure below, GWAS involves scanning
markers across the entire genome ( 0.5M or 1M) of
many subjects (several thousand or more) in a natural
population to find genetic variations associated with
particular traits in the nature population.
This method involves a wide range of germplasm
collection, large amount of phenotyping.


