Thursday, August 01, 2002 (The Star) - IT HAS been called the golden cropand rightly so for Malaysia. Introduced to the country in 1870 from WestAfrica, the oil palm is now the most important agricultural crop inMalaysia. According to the Statistics Department, palm oil and palmoil-based products were the country’s second largest export revenue earnerlast year with a combined worth of RM15.1bil.Oil palm is the most efficient oil crop compared to soybean, corn, canolaand sunflower. And palm oil is among the most versatile of oils – it isuseful both as a food product and industrial raw material.Nevertheless there are several hiccups with oil palm production and palmoil acceptance. Production of uniform planting material via tissue cultureis relatively expensive because of the low rate of success. Acceptance ofpalm oil in Western markets is still low – a result of smear campaigns tobrand palm oil as an unhealthy “saturated oil.” (Palm oil actually has aunique mix of saturated and unsaturated oils.) And Malaysia needs tocontinually add value to its palm oil to remain competitive against otherlower-cost producing countries.Hence biotechnology offers unique opportunities to improve this versatileand useful crop. The Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) – formerly known asthe Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia – spearheads the research anddevelopment of oil palm and its products in collaboration with localuniversities.In fact, oil palm is so important it is a major target of the Malaysia-MITBiotechnology Partnership Programme. This and independent MPOB programmesare using biotechnology tools to solve problems with the oil palm. Fromincreasing the efficiency of tissue culture to developing palm oils withnovel uses, MPOB’s biotechnology research into the oil palm runs the gamutof applications.Culture clubIt had been a problem that bothered the oil palm industry since the 1980s.When oil palms were first successfully tissue cultured in the 1980s, itwas hailed as a breakthrough because there was no other way to propagateoil palms vegetatively. (Vegetative propagation is preferred to seedpropagation as vegetatively propagated plants retain all the superiorqualities of the original plant.) But the rate of success for tissuecultured plantlets (as the young plants are called) remains low; between6% and 20%, depending on the material used.Now scientists are going back to the drawing board and looking at thegenes that control development during tissue culture. They hope that bystudying the genes involved, they would be able to identify the reasonsfor the successes and failures, and pinpoint the correct methods to tissueculture oil palm.As part of the project, MPOB is coordinating an effort to create an oilpalm genome map. All the major oil palm plantation companies have pitchedin to assist in this effort. Scientists hope that the maps will provideclues into which and why certain oil palms are more successfully tissuecultured than others.In addition, other teams are looking into improving methods of tissueculture production and automating the processes to reduce the costsinvolved. The ultimate aim is to increase the efficiency and reduce thecosts of producing palm oil plantlets.Bagging the problemThe oil palm has a pesky insect problem. Oil palm’s mostdifficult-to-control pests are bagworms. These caterpillars build bagsfrom leave fragments (hence the name) and live protected inside these bagswhile they continue feeding on oil palm leaves. Sometimes bagworminfestations can get so bad that leaves on palms in entire plantations areleft only with spines. Controlling bagworms with chemical pesticides donot work very well as the caterpillars are hidden inside the bags. Inaddition, pesticides often affect other beneficial insects instead.One alternative method of control which Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’sDr Ruslan Abdullah has successfully tested is to protect the oil palm fromthe inside out. Dr Ruslan has put a gene from cowpea, a legume, into theoil palm. This gene produces a substance that makes the bagworm sick whenit feeds on the oil palm leaves. In lab tests, Dr Ruslan has shown thatthis method successfully protects the oil palm from bagworms – inspiringhope that it may eventually be one of the strategies to be rid of this bagof worms without insecticides.Designer oilsThe oil palm is a veritable plant factory. Currently products as diverseas vitamins, pigments and raw material for industrial use are derived frompalm oil.However, plant breeders at MPOB hope to come up with “designer” palms thatwould specialise in the production of specific products or oils.For example, the oil palm for edible oils would be high in oleates – themonounsaturated portion of the oil, making it a healthier oil. Forindustrial uses, there would be an oil palm that is high in stearates.Another type of oil palm could be designed to produced carotenoids moreefficiently for the vitamins and pigments market.But to accomplish these goals, scientists first need to understand how theoil palm produces all these oils. Right now there are different groupsstudying the processes involved in oil and pigment production.Other groups are looking at developing methods to put genes of interestinto the oil palm and designing the constructs – the set of genes thatwill make a gene work as desired – for different uses.But biotechnology could create new uses for the oil palm. Scientists hopeto use the oil palm as a plant factory to produce biodegradable plastics.Currently most plastics are petroleum-based and their production anddegradation may release toxins into the environment. On the other hand,polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable plastic is naturally producedby certain bacteria under nutrient-deficient conditions. Researchers arelooking into ways where they could put the genes that produce this plasticinto oil palm to enable the palm to be a renewable source of thisenvironment friendly plastic.If the project works, oil palm could be a renewable resource for plasticsthat are biodegradable.Nevertheless all these projects are still very much restricted to thelabs. MPOB foresees that these projects will only be ready forcommercialisation in the next 10 to 12 years. If the current research anddevelopment deliver on their promises, the golden crop may become evenmore valuable to Malaysia in the future.