Cloning program for oil palm compact varieties by ASD of Costa Rica : realities and commercial potential

For the time being, the problem of mantled fruit is considered irrelevant for the oil palm clones production program of ASD of Costa Rica, given it has appeared only in one clone and with a very low incidence. Over 1.000 hectares have been planted since 2005 with clonal material in different countries of America and Asia. The low rate of abnormalities in clones is due to the use of a ?safe protocol? at the lab, which includes the use of young inflorescences as explants, the induction of embryogenesis in solid means with low concentrations of growth regulators, the proliferation of embryoids and the development of shoots in a medium without regulators and an efficient radical system. The use of inflorescences allows a repeated sampling in the same elite plant every 6-8 months, which indicates the little damage done to the plant during tissue extraction and enables an increase in commercial productivity. At the present time the laboratory has the capacity of producing half a million ramets per year and there are plans to expand it so as to achieve 5 million. An additional innovation to the program is the clone reproduction of compact varieties, which have the possibility of being planted in high densities and of giving a better use to the land resource. The compact material comes from a specific plant, segregated from an open pollination crossing of Elaeis oleifera x e. guineensis; the outstanding characteristics of this palm, known as original compact palm, is its reduced growth rate of its trunk and its short leaves. Notwithstanding this, the original compact palm?s bunches have a very poor composition, mainly low mesocarp and oil contents; consequently it was necessary to do introgression with the genes of the ?guineensis? population so as to improve the oil potential production of the original compact palm or OCP. Three back-crossing cycles have taken place, which took over 33 years of on-going breeding. The new step is to introduce ?ortets? of a new generation of compact palms with a higher potential, which were planted as of 1996. Moreover, this gives the possibility of using densities of 180 or more palms per hectare (which in turn, increases the amount of fruit per unit area), many of the selected elite palms (ortets) also have a high oil extraction rate, as a result of this the commercial potential of these compact materials is higher than that of a clone coming from e. guineensis.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Alvarado, Amancio, Guzmán, Nidia, Chinchilla, Carlos, Escobar, Ricardo
Format:	Digital revista
Language:	spa
Published:	Fedepalma 2007
Online Access:	https://publicaciones.fedepalma.org/index.php/palmas/article/view/1262
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