Review: Omics and Strategic Yield Improvement in Oil Crops

Abstract

Crop yield improvement is essential for feeding the growing world population without concomitant increases in land allocated to agriculture. Oil crops are critical components of food supply as well as non-food applications. Oil palm is of particular value due to its significantly higher yield per unit area of land as compared to other oil crops. In the context of sustainable production of edible oils, this review will discuss the role of biochemical-omics techniques, including metabolomics, transcriptomics and proteomics research for yield improvement through plant breeding; in particular, the unique challenges of the mesocarp-oil bearing perennial crop, oil palm, are specifically discussed along with perspectives on what is needed for future crop improvement. Future oil crop improvement will need to go beyond classical trait selection, and omics research needs to go beyond looking at oil biosynthesis and fruit development. We need to explore carbon supply and flux, plant stress response, nutrient uptake and water use through a combination of genetics, biochemistry, epigenetics and gene interaction coupled to more detailed and continuous phenotypic data analysis.

Predicting Heritability of Oil Palm Breeding Using Phenotypic Traits and Machine Learning

“…Physical traits are observed and are key features such as maturity, resistance to pests, or other observable traits [35]. Phenotypic data were obtained for several years before biochemical analysis was made by recording results such as mesocarp mass, the number of bunches produced per year, and mesocarp oil content [36]. Selection based on phenotype is called mass selection, i.e., selecting the desired type to include better adaptation.…”

“…This mass selection includes quantitative phenotypes related to complex yield traits for annual crops, resistance to pests, and drought [15]. Combination seeds based on phenotypic selection will undoubtedly be helpful in the future [35,36].…”

Towards the Understanding of Important Coconut Endosperm Phenotypes: Is there an Epigenetic Control?

“…VCO is resistant to lipid peroxidation, and increases important antioxidant enzymes (such as superoxide mutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase), hepatic antioxidant enzymes and lipid-controlling enzymes (such as paraoxonase-1) that could protect against coronary heart disease [11,[28][29][30][31]. A comparison of the fatty acid composition in edible vegetable oils derived from coconut, oil palm, canola, corn, cottonseed, flax or linseed, olive, peanut, soybean and sunflower shows that coconut oil and palm oil are rich sources of lauric acid (C12) ( Table 1) and are considered to be of high economic value [3,5,16,[18][19][20]. Lauric acid is a medium-chain triglyceride that is beneficial for human health and nutrition [16].…”

Role of Antihypertensive Peptides from Plant (sesame, almond and pumpkin) Seed Storage Protein

“…Sesame crop has been grown for centuries owing to its high content of excellent quality oil and protein (Gharby et al, 2017;Pathak et al, 2014). The amino acid composition of the sesame seeds is unique and unusual among the oilseed proteins, due to its high content of sulphur-containing amino acids (methionine and cysteine) and low content of lysine (Khan et al, 2016;Laohakunjit et al, 2017;Teh et al, 2017). It is one of the earliest condiment and crop grown for edible oil.…”