Jessenia palm are being gwon in the form of open-pollinated families mainly at MPOB Research Stations in an effort to evaluate at MPOB Research Stations in an effort to evaluate their yield performance and agronomic traits. Today, MPOB houses the world’s largest oil palm germplasm collection. Useful traits from this collection are being incorporated into the oil palm breeding programme. Realizing the potential of Jessenia as a new crop that yields high quality edible oil, we attempted to isolate fatty acid biosynthenic genes from Jessenia that can be used for manipulating palm oil and other oil crops. Although Jessenia is very valuable in terms of oil quality and could become an immediate option as an acceptable subsitute to olive oil, it has received minimal attention, and efforts towards the goal of fomesticating this species have scarcely begun.

Main Research: Dr Umi Salamah Ramli