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Oil palm breeding has been progressing very well in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite this progress, there are still problems due to the difficulty of controlled crossing in oil palm. Contaminated/illegitimate progeny has appeared in some breeding programs; late and failure of detection by the traditional method causes a waste of time and labor. The use of molecular markers improves the integrity of breeding programs in perennial crops such as oil palm. Four half-sib families with a total of 200 progeny were used in this study. Thirty polymorphic single locus DNA microsatellites markers were typed to identify the illegitimate individuals and to obtain the correct parental and progeny assignments by using the CERVUS and COLONY programs. Three illegitimate palms (1.5 %) were found, and 16 loci proved to be sufficient for sibship assignments without parental genotypes by using the COLONY program. The pairwise-likelihood score (PLS) method was better for half-sib family assignments than the full likelihood (FL) method.

The oil palm is badly affected by basal stem rot (BSR) disease in Southeast Asia. BSR disease is caused by the fungus Ganoderma boninense, which is a major threat to oil palm compared with other Ganoderma spp. Molecular markers associated with BSR disease will accelerate the identification process of resistant breeding materials in screening of plants for tolerance to the disease at the nursery stage. In this study, 58 simple sequence repeat markers were utilized with three progeny types, namely, KA4G1, KA4G8, and KA14G8, to perform a comparative molecular mapping for association with BSR. A total of 319 alleles were identified with an average of 5.51 alleles per locus. Five markers, mEgCIR0793:180, mEgCIR0894:200, mEgCIR03295:210, mEgCIR3737:146 and mEgCIR3785:299 were found to be associated with Ganoderma disease with P values of 0.018, 0.033, 0.037, 0.034 and 0.037, respectively, in single progeny analysis. However, in pooled data (KA4G1, KA4G8 and KA14G8), only two alleles, mEgCIR0804:213 (P value = 0.001) and mEgCIR3292:183 (P value = 0.001), were found to be associated with Ganoderma disease. These analyses confirmed that progeny type KA4G1 was tolerant, whereas the other two were susceptible progeny types. These markers and KA4 progeny will be useful in future works on BSR disease resistance in oil palm.

In an effort to meet the increasing demand for food arising from the growing human population, it is important to ensure food security by maintaining the continual supply of crop products and increase their productions. However, crops plantations are often challenged by the presences of pest insects and pathogens that could inflict diseases or feed on the crop plants and lead to massive losses in the crop productions. While chemical pesticides are commonly employed to control pest insects and pathogens problems, it is often associated with numerous negative side effects and excessive usage would cause lasting detrimental effects to the environments and consumers. Alternatively, crop plants with improved traits were produced through the application of biotechnology techniques to provide phytoprotection against pest insects and pathogens. Genes that encode for natural plant defence products, such as protease inhibitors, are genetically engineered into the crop plants and it is reported to be effectively showing insecticidal and anti-pathogenic properties. For this purpose, it is crucial to constantly discover uncharacterized protease inhibitors from novel sources as candidate for phytoprotection as this helps to overcome the adaptation and resistance buildup by the pest insects and pathogens. Turmeric plant is a well-known herbal plant commonly used as traditional medicine and it acts as a suitable novel source for discovery of protease inhibitors. As turmeric’s secondary metabolites are reported to exhibit a wide range of medicinal properties, it could be contributed by protease inhibitors which possessed high anti-pathogenic and inhibitory properties.

The chapters in the book are derived from selected oral presentations at the International Conference on Crop Improvement held in Malaysia in December 2015.

Rice is one of the most important cereal crops with great potential for biotechnology progress. In transformation method, antibiotic resistance genes are routinely used as powerful markers for selecting transformed cells from surrounding non-transformed cells. In this study, the toxicity level of hygromycin was optimized for two selected mutant rice lines, MR219 line 4 and line 9. The mature embryos were isolated and cultured on an MS medium with different hygromycin concentrations (0, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 mg L(-1)). Evidently, above 60 mg L(-1) was effective for callus formation and observed completely dead. Further there were tested for specific concentration (0-60). Although, 21.28% calli survived on the medium containing 45 mg L(-1) hygromycin, it seemed suitable for the identification of putative transformants. These findings indicated that a system for rice transformation in a relatively high frequency and the transgenes are stably expressed in the transgenic plants. Green shoots were regenerated from the explant under hygromycin stress. RT-PCR using hptII and gus sequence specific primer and Southern blot analysis were used to confirm the presence of the transgene and to determine the transformation efficiency for their stable integration in regenerated plants. This study demonstrated that the hygromycin resistance can be used as an effective marker for rice transformation.