In digital agriculture, accurate crop detection is fundamental to developing automated systems for efficient plantation management. For oil palm, the main challenge lies in developing robust models that perform well in different environmental conditions. This study addresses the feasibility of using GAN augmentation methods to improve palm detection models. For this purpose, drone images of young palms (< 5 year-old) from eight different estates were collected, annotated, and used to build a baseline detection model based on DETR. StyleGAN2 was trained on the extracted palms and then used to generate a series of synthetic palms, which were then inserted into tiles representing different environments. CycleGAN networks were trained for bidirectional translation between synthetic and real tiles, subsequently utilized to augment the authenticity of synthetic tiles. Both synthetic and real tiles were used to train the GAN-based detection model. The baseline model achieved precision and recall values of 95.8

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) yield is impacted by abiotic stresses, leading to significant economic losses. To understand the core abiotic stress transcriptome (CAST) of oil palm, we performed RNA-Seq analyses of oil palm leaves subjected to drought, salinity, waterlogging, heat, and cold stresses. A total of 19,834 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified. Cold treatment induced the highest number of DEGs (5,300), followed by heat (4,114), drought (3,751), waterlogging (3,573), and, lastly, salinity (3096) stress. Subsequent analysis revealed the CAST of oil palm, comprising 588 DEGs commonly expressed under drought, salinity, waterlogging, heat, and cold stress conditions. Function annotation of these DEGs suggests their roles in signal transduction, transcription regulation, and abiotic stress responses including synthesis of osmolytes, secondary metabolites, and molecular chaperones. Moreover, we identified core DEGs encoding kinases, ERF, NAC TFs, heat shock proteins, E3 ubiquitin-protein ligase, terpineol synthase, and cytochrome P450. These core DEGs may be potential key modulators that interplay in triggering rapid abiotic stress responses to achieve delicate equilibrium between productivity and adaptation to abiotic stresses. This comprehensive study provides insights into the key modulators in the CAST of oil palm, and their potential applications as markers for selecting climate-resilient oil palms or opportunities to develop future climate resilient oil palm using genome editing.

In digital agriculture, a central challenge in automating drone applications in the plantation sector, including oil palm, is the development of a detection model that can adapt across diverse environments. This study addresses the feasibility of using GAN augmentation methods to improve palm detection models. For this purpose, drone images of young palms (< 5 year-old) from eight different estates were collected, annotated, and used to build a baseline detection model based on DETR. StyleGAN2 was trained on the extracted palms and then used to generate a series of synthetic palms, which were then inserted into tiles representing different environments. CycleGAN networks were trained for bidirectional translation between synthetic and real tiles, subsequently utilized to augment the authenticity of synthetic tiles. Both synthetic and real tiles were used to train the GAN-based detection model. The baseline model achieved precision and recall values of 95.8% and 97.2%, whereas the GAN-based model achieved precision and recall values of 98.5% and 98.6%. In the challenge dataset 1 consisting older palms (> 5 year-old), both models also achieved similar accuracies, with baseline model achieving precision and recall of 93.1% and 99.4%, and GAN-based model achieving 95.7% and 99.4%. As for the challenge dataset 2 consisting of storm affected palms, the baseline model achieved precision of 100% but recall was only 13%, whereas GAN-based model achieved a high precision and recall values of 98.7% and 95.3%. This result demonstrates that images generated by GANs have the potential to enhance the accuracies of palm detection models.

Driven by the demand for more sustainable products, research and capital investment has been committed to developing microbially produced oils. While researchers have shown oleaginous yeasts and other microbes can produce low-carbon footprint oils by leveraging waste streams as energy sources, previous analyses have not fully explored the quantity of available waste streams and in turn economy-of-scale enabled on capital and operating expenses. This paper makes parallels to 2G ethanol facilities, enabling a data-driven understanding of large-scale production economics. Production costs are broken down for a variety of scenarios. The analysis finds that reaching price parity with large-scale commodity oils (e.g., palm oil, high-oleic cooking oils, biofuels feedstock oils, lauric acid) is not possible today and unlikely even under aggressive future assumptions about strain productivity. Instead, commercial production must be targeted at end markets where sustainability-conscious consumers are willing to pay the price premiums identified in this paper. ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY:This paper makes parallels to 2G ethanol facilities, enabling a data-driven understanding of large-scale production economics for microbial lipids.

When oil palm is exposed to, and infected by Ganoderma boninense, the initial defence system is launched in the roots to reduce the damage caused by the disease.The present work described the transcript and protein profiles in roots of 18 months old oil palm seedlings that were exposed to the fungal pathogen for 12 months, following artificial inoculation at six months old.Three different phenotypes were observed; control (uninoculated), asymptomatic, and symptomatic (inoculated).It was found that the transcripts from the ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis pathway were common in control and asymptomatic seedlings; while proteins involved in cellular processes, and protein and sugar metabolisms were higher in abundance in asymptomatic seedlings.The transcripts involved in carbon fixation, glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, and pyruvate metabolism together with proteins responsible for stress response were identified in symptomatic seedlings.By integrating these omics data, it was observed that symptomatic seedlings were moving towards generating and storing energy for a possible defence strategy, and at the same time emitting stress signals and responses.This was in contrast with asymptomatic seedlings where regular functions such as cellular processes and carbohydrate metabolisms were found to be active.

Background: The level of free fatty acids (FFAs) is an important oil quality index that is consistently measured at mills and refineries to ensure that palm oil is within specification limits. FFAs can accumulate at any point throughout the process, for example, during fresh fruit bunch (FFB) harvesting or during the mill process before sterilisation. Another key contributor to FFA build-up is loose fruit (LF), which is collected following FFB harvesting and is commonly processed together with FFB into crude palm oil (CPO) at the mill. The aim of this study was to identify pivotal points of FFA formation during the process of crude palm oil production. Results: The present study shows that the highest FFA accumulation occurred during the conveying process at the mill before sterilisation due to significant fruit damage. The rapid formation of FFA occurred during the first 15 min of oil palm fruit bruising. A minimum temperature of 60 °C for one hour was needed to deactivate the lipase activity, which is responsible for FFA formation. Blending high-FFA CPO with standard CPO affected indices of palm oil quality, such as the deteriorated peroxide value (PV) and anisidine value (AV), and particularly worsened the bleachability index (DOBI). Conclusions: This study suggests that the conveyor system in the mill could be the prime area to focus on in terms of FFA reduction, along with minimising bruising events. In addition, loose fruits (LF) with high FFA content should be processed separately from FFB, and high-FFA CPO derived from LF should not be mixed with standard CPO.

During the milling process of palm oil, the degree of palm fruit ripeness is a critical factor that affects the quality and quantity of the oil. As the palm fruit matures, its chlorophyll level decreases, and since chlorophyll in oil has undesirable effects on hydrogenation, bleachability, and oxidative degradation, it’s important to monitor the chlorophyll content in palm oil during the milling process. This study investigated the use of light-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (LICF) for non-invasive and real-time monitoring of chlorophyll content in diluted crude palm oil (DCO) located at the dilution and oil classification point in palm oil mill. An LICF probe was installed at the secondary pipe connected to main DCO pipeline, and the system communicates with a computer located in a separate control room via a Wi-Fi connection. Continuous measurements were recorded with an integration time of 500 ms, averaging of 10, and a time interval of 1 min between each recording during the oil mill’s operation. All data were stored on the computer and in the cloud. We collected 60 DCO samples and sent them to the laboratory for American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS) measurement to compare with the LICF signal. The LICF method achieved a correlation coefficient of 0.88 with the AOCS measurements, and it also provided a direct, quantitative, and unbiased assessment of the fruit ripeness in the mill. By incorporating Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and cloud storage, this LICF system enables remote and real-time access to data for chemometrics analysis.

The oil palm-pollinating weevil (Elaeidobius kamerunicus Faust) was introduced from Cameroon, West Africa, to Malaysia in 1981, and subsequently, to other oil palm-growing countries as well. This study aims to develop a set of robust E. kamerunicus-specific nuclear DNA markers to directly assess the genetic diversity of the weevil populations. A total of 19,148 SNP and 223,200 SSR were discovered from 48 weevils representing three origins (Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, and Riau) using RAD tag sequencing. Subsequent filtering steps further reduced these to 1000 SNP and 120 SSR. The selected 220 SNP exhibited a polymorphism information content (PIC) of 0.2387 (±0.1280), and 8 SSR had the PIC of 0.5084 (±0.1928). These markers were found to show sufficient polymorphism, making it possible to assign 180 weevils into three major clusters from Ghana, Cameroon, and Southeast Asia (mainly in Malaysia and Indonesia). These DNA markers successfully confirmed the Cameroon origin of the Southeast Asian cluster. However, the presence of null alleles in the SSR markers, due to limited flexibility of the probe design on the short RAD tags, led to an underestimation of heterozygosity within the populations. Hence, the developed SNP markers turned out to be more efficient than the SSR markers in the genetic diversity assessment of the E. kamerunicus populations. The genetic information provides useful insight into developing guidelines for the genetic monitoring and conservation planning of E. kamerunicus.

In commercial Dura x Pisifera (DxP) seed production, white-coloured seeds are perceived as abnormal despite lack of scientific evidence to support this. This study evaluates different seed colour (black, semi-white and white) during germination and nursery evaluation. Four replications of 10 seeds were used for the evaluation of seed characteristic. Seed germination was conducted using four replications of 100 seeds by subjecting the seeds to 60 days of heat-treatment followed by germination at 30 degrees C. Thirty pre-germinated DxP seeds per replication were then transferred into the nursery for morphological, physiological and growth assessment at three months interval until 12 months after sowing. Germination test shows all seed types indicated similar germination percentage (more than 78%) and speed (13-15 days of mean germination time). Nursery assessment shows black seed indicated higher overall biomass within the first three months, however, no differences in growth were observed from six until 12 months after sowing. Physiological evaluation including net photosynthesis (5.3-18.13 mu mol CO2 m(-2) s(-1)), stomatal conductance and transpiration rate were similar among the seedlings produced by seeds differing in colour. Hence, seed colour does not implicate abnormality and should not be discarded for the purpose of seed production.

Ethylene gas can be applied to oil palm fresh fruit bunches (FFB) to enhance fruit detachment and produce fresh loose fruits (LF) that could be processed separately to reduce oil loss due to empty fruit bunch (EFB) absorption during the milling process.Response surface methodology (RSM) with central composite design (CCD) was employed to achieve optimum fruit detachment in oil palm FFB as the main response with two experimental variables, which were ethylene concentration (500 to 2000 ppm) and incubation period (18 to 24 hr).The proposed model showed an R 2 value of 0.85 where the experimental variables were significant to the result.From the model, 26% of the targeted fruit detachment was attained with ethylene concentration of 1102.7 ppm and an incubation period of 21.5 hr.The application of optimum ethylene gas and incubation time from the study can be then tested on a pilot scale to reduce optimisation time.

Global climatic change poses a considerable risk to Malaysia’s booming oil palm industry as theinflorescence initiation and differentiation in oil palms are affected by drought stress. As a result, theproportion of female flowers significantly decreases, leading to reduced fruit bunch productivity. Hence, itis crucial for plantation companies to understand the physiological response of different oil palm genotypesto drought stress in ensuring that suitable genotypes are selected for stable yield production. Therefore, thisstudy aimed to understand the physiological and biochemical responses of oil palm seedlings under droughtstress conditions and to identify drought-responsive miRNAs in different oil palm progenies. Drought stresstreatment was imposed on 3-month-old seedlings consisting of two oil palm genotypes, Deli dura x pisifera(BC21) and URT-Calabar (EB8), by withholding irrigation for 20 days. Physiological measurements suchas fluorescence parameter (Fv/Fm) and stomatal conductance (gs) were then carried out weekly. Biochemicalassays were also performed to measure the chlorophyll content and proline concentration. Finally, advancedmolecular techniques were conducted to identify drought-responsive miRNA from drought stress samples.Based on the results, the decreased soil volumetric water content (vwc) resulted in a reduced plant growthrate with low biomass in drought stress BC21T (37%) and EB8T (31%). In addition, the increased prolinecontent in both genotypes by 3.9-fold for BC21T and 1.8-fold for EB8T confirmed the stress condition intreated seedlings. Furthermore, significant differences in gs and Fv/Fm were recorded earlier in BC21 (6days, 14 days) compared to EB8 (14 days, 20 days). The earlier gs reduction indicated that BC21 was moresensitive to drought stress than EB8. Meanwhile, bioinformatics analysis of small RNA sequencing readsidentified 151 conserved miRNAs in both genotypes, with 58 out of 77 identified as novel miRNAs weredifferentially expressed. Apart from that, nine miRNAs were identified as responsive to drought treatmentin both genotypes and played an essential role in various biological processes. Overall, this study providesvaluable insights into exploring oil palm physiological responses to drought and miRNA expressionpatterns, which may facilitate future research on developing drought tolerant markers.

BACKGROUND:The ability of plants to withstand and thrive in an adverse environment is crucial to ensure their survivability and yield performance. The WRKY transcription factors (TFs) have crucial roles in plant growth, development and stress response, particularly drought stress. In oil palm, drought is recognized as one of the major yield limiting factors. However, the roles of WRKY TFs in the drought response of oil palm is unclear. RESULTS:Herein, we studied the transcriptome of drought treated oil palm leaf and identified 40 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of WRKY TFs, of which 32 DEGs were upregulated and 8 DEGs were downregulated in response to drought stress in oil palm. They were categorized into Groups I to IV based on the numbers of WRKY domain and the structural difference in the zinc finger domain. Multiple stress- and hormone-responsive cis-regulatory elements were detected in the drought responsive oil palm EgWRKY (Dro-EgWRKY) genes. Fourteen of the 15 selected oil palm WRKY (EgWRKY) genes demonstrated a tissue-specific expression profile except for EgWRKY28 (Group I), which was expressed in all tissues tested. The expression levels of 15 candidate EgWRKYs were upregulated upon salinity and heat treatments, while several genes were also inducible by abscisic acid, methyl jasmonate, salicylic acid and hydrogen peroxide treatments. Members of the Group III WRKY TFs including EgWRKY07, 26, 40, 52, 59, 73 and 81 displayed multiple roles in drought- and salinity-response under the modulation of phytohormones. CONCLUSIONS:EgWRKY TFs of oil palm are involved in phytohormones and abiotic stress responses including drought, salinity and heat. EgWRKY07, 26, 59 and 81 from Group III maybe important regulators in modulating responses of different abiotic stresses. Further functional analysis is required to understand the underlying mechanism of WRKY TFs in the regulatory network of drought stress.

The processing of oil palm fresh fruit bunches (FFB), together with loose fruits, in the current mill operation contributes to oil loss and high free fatty acids (FFA), affecting crude palm oil quality. Fruit detachment induced by ethephon and ethylene may mitigate the current processing issues. This study shows that a 0.50% (v/v) ethephon application by the evaporation method induced the highest fruit detachment of 30.8 ± 1.1% after 24 h at room temperature, with the FFA content in the extracted crude palm oil at 0.34 ± 0.09%. Ethephon application was effective on bunches between 14 and 28 kg, and fruit detachment was higher in ripe and underripe bunches at 24.1 ± 0.9% and 23.2 ± 0.1%, respectively. A significant fruit detachment of 47.2 ± 2.4% was achieved when the bunches were also stripped mechanically, but the FFA content increased almost 4-fold, from 1.0 ± 0.2% to 3.8 ± 1.2%. The application of ethylene gas at 750 ppm yielded 29.4 ± 1.9% fruit detachment. The findings present the possibility of using ethylene as an indirect method for minimizing oil loss without increasing the FFA content in future crude palm oil production systems.

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system has emerged as a powerful tool for the precise editing of plant genomes for crop improvement. Rapid in vitro methods for the determination of guide RNA (gRNA) cleavage efficiency and an efficient DNA delivery system is essential for gene editing. However, we lack an efficient gene-editing system for palm species. In this study, we described the development of a transient oil palm protoplast assay to rapidly evaluate the cleavage efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis and the generation of stable transformed oil palms using biolistic particle bombardment in immature embryos. Using the phytoene desaturase (EgPDS) gene, we found cleavage frequency of up to 25.49% in electro-transfected protoplast, which enables the production of transgenic oil palm shoots exhibiting chimeric albino phenotypes as a result of DNA insertions, deletions (InDels), and nucleotide substitutions, with a mutation efficiency of 62.5–83.33%. We further validated the mutagenesis efficiency and specificity of the CRISPR/Cas9 system in oil palm by targeting the brassinosteroid-insensitive 1 (EgBRI1) gene, which resulted in nucleotide substitutions in EgBRI1 with premature necrosis phenotype in oil palm transgenic shoots and stunted phenotype resulting from DNA InDels. Taken together, our results showed that effective and efficient editing of genes using the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be achieved in oil palm by optimizing the selection of efficient gRNA and DNA delivery methods. This newly designed strategy will enable new routes for the genetic improvement in oil palm and related species.

Chlorinated compounds such as sphingolipid-based organochlorine compounds are precursors for the formation of 3-monochlororopanediol (3-MCPD) esters in palm oil. This study evaluates the effects of several factors within the palm oil supply chain on the levels of sphingolipid-based organochlorine, which in turn may influence the formation of 3-MCPD esters during refining. These factors include application of inorganic chlorinated fertiliser in the oil palm plantation, bruising and degradation of oil palm fruits after harvest, recycling of steriliser condensate as water for dilution of crude oil during oil palm milling, water washing of palm oil and different refining conditions. It was observed that bruised and degraded oil palm fruits showed higher content of sphingolipid-based organochlorine than control. In addition, recycling steriliser condensate during milling resulted in elevated content of sphingolipid-based organochlorine in palm oil. However, the content of sphingolipid-based organochlorine compounds was reduced by neutralisation, degumming and bleaching steps during refining. Although water washing of crude palm oils (CPO) prior to refining did not reduce the content of sphingolipid-based organochlorine, it did reduce the formation of 3-MCPD esters through the removal of water-soluble chlorinated compounds. It was found that the use of inorganic chlorinated fertiliser in plantations did not increase the content of chlorinated compounds in oil palm fruits and extracted oil, and hence chlorinated fertiliser does not seem to play a role in the formation of 3-MCPD esters in palm oil. Overall, this study concluded that lack of freshness and damage to the fruits during transport to mills, combined with water and oil recycling in mills are the major contributors of chlorinated precursor for 3-MCPD esters formation in palm oil.

Oil palm seed producers typically require 10 months of various processes from pollination to seed germination to produce commercial dura × pisifera hybrid seeds. Conventional forced fruit shedding from underripe fresh fruit bunches (FFB) usually causes seed damage and an extended retting period (incubation for natural fruit abscission from spikelets), eventually leading to bunch rot and disease infection. As a fruit ripening agent, ethephon has been explored to hasten fruit abscission in many fruit crops and oil palm. Nevertheless, the previous studies in oil palm only focused on fruit shedding from FFB to improve oil extraction rate in oil mills without considering the actual FFB ripeness and retting period, which are critical for oil palm seed production. In this study, the application of ethephon containing buffer (adjusted to pH 9.0) to underripe FFB at 145 days after pollination (DAP), 135 DAP and 125 DAP resulted in 50% more fruit abscission after a 72-h incubation. Considering the minimal seed loss upon FFB harvest (<1%) and 50% reduction in retting period, underripe FFB at around 145 DAP was found to be optimum for seed production using ethephon treatment. The treatment, however, made negligible improvement in fruit detachment for ripe FFB at 150 DAP and older. Importantly, seed germination and culling rate at nursery stages were not significantly affected by the ethephon treatment. Hence, ethephon application can improve commercial seed production practices for oil palm.

Sterilisation in palm oil mills is considered a pre-treatment process as it affects stripping efficiency and oil quality. Although sterilisation technology has been well-established in the palm oil milling industry, the roles and principles of sterilisation, particularly related to the chemical changes in fruits and stalks occurring during the process, have been rarely reported. The review begins with the background literature on the biochemical properties of the FFBs, such as the compositions of binding carbohydrates and the phenomena of natural fruit detachment. Followed by the harvesting practice to understand the type of FFBs supplied to the industry. In addition, a comparison of the well-established conventional and alternative sterilisation technologies and sterilisation functions is critically reviewed and assessed. Establishing the current sterilisation process initiatives to address the natural fruit’s separation more efficiently in palm oil mills is important. Particularly visualise sterilisation as a breakup of specific binding carbohydrates that leads to strippability. It will provide a further understanding of the sterilisation mechanism, which would benefit the palm oil miller in optimising the processing of fresh fruit bunches. The information provided in this review is necessary to mitigate the percentage of unstripped bunches and reduce the oil losses and ultimately enhance the oil extraction rate.

Stomatal density is an important trait for breeding selection of drought tolerant oil palms; however, its measurement is extremely tedious. To accelerate this process, we developed an automated system. Leaf samples from 128 palms ranging from nursery (1 years old), juvenile (2–3 years old) and mature (> 10 years old) were collected to build an oil palm specific stomata detection model. Micrographs were split into tiles, then used to train a stomata object detection convolutional neural network model through transfer learning. The detection model was then tested on leaf samples acquired from three independent oil palm populations of young seedlings (A), juveniles (B) and productive adults (C). The detection accuracy, measured in precision and recall, was 98.00% and 99.50% for set A, 99.70% and 97.65% for set B, and 99.55% and 99.62% for set C, respectively. The detection model was cross-applied to another set of adult palms using stomata images taken with a different microscope and under different conditions (D), resulting in precision and recall accuracy of 99.72% and 96.88%, respectively. This indicates that the model built generalized well, in addition has high transferability. With the completion of this detection model, stomatal density measurement can be accelerated. This in turn will accelerate the breeding selection for drought tolerance.

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is the most traded crop among the economically important palm species. Here, we report an extended version genome of E. guineensis that is 1.2 Gb in length, an improvement of the physical genome coverage to 79% from the previous 43%. The improvement was made by assigning an additional 1968 originally unplaced scaffolds that were available publicly into the physical genome. By integrating three ultra-dense linkage maps and using them to place genomic scaffolds, the 16 pseudomolecules were extended. As we show, the improved genome has enhanced the mapping resolution for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and permitted further identification of candidate genes/protein-coding regions (CDSs) and any non-coding RNA that may be associated with them for further studies. We then employed the new physical map in a comparative genomics study against two other agriculturally and economically important palm species-date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) and coconut palm (Cocos nucifera L.)-confirming the high level of conserved synteny among these palm species. We also used the improved oil palm genome assembly version as a palm genome reference to extend the date palm physical map. The improved genome of oil palm will enable molecular breeding approaches to expedite crop improvement, especially in the largest subfamily of Arecoideae, which consists of 107 species belonging to Arecaceae.