The fungal population in oil palm plantation soil plays a diverse role that affect the palm tree productivity. Therefore, advance in fungal identification technique is crucial in order to investigate the importance of this microbial community. Fungal identification procedure is made easy by the introduction of MicroSeq® D2 LSU rDNA fungal identification sequencing system. This is an alternative molecular identification system for FIDS 1 and FIDS 3 that targets the ITS and 18S DNA regions. FIDS 2 is suitable for a large number of samples because of the rapid identification process compared to the FIDS 1 and FIDS 3. This identification system provides a precise tool to amplify and sequence the ribosomal RNA gene nuclear large subunit (LSU) expansion segment, D2 region rapidly (Sonnenberg et al., 2007). Specifically, organisms can be identified until the species level based on the variation of DNA segments within the region (Sipiczki et al., 2013). The identification procedure required a small quantity of a pure fungal culture for DNA amplification and sequencing. 

Main Research: Mohd Shawal Thakib Maidin