Genome wide association study reveals key genic regions controlling oil palm vegetative characters in wild population of Cameroon

Abstract

Cameroon’s oil palm germplasm is contributing a lot towards the improvement of genetic variation in the base oil palm population used in breeding programs around the world. There is a new oil palm germplasm collection at Dibamba constituted of 169 wild accessions but whose genomic study was not implemented before now. Genome-wide-association study is considered as a powerful tool to identify genomic specific allele variants controlling the expression of important agronomic traits in crops. This approach could potentially accelerate varietal improvement in plant breeding programs. The objective of this study was to identify genic regions across the investigated oil palm genomes which are conferred to control natural variation for oil palm vegetative traits such as leaflet width and leaf area. The allele and genotype frequencies were significantly detected to be in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P<0.01) for these vegetative traits. Across the genome, important numbers of single nucleotide polymorphisms were associated with the oil palm leaflet width and leaf area characters. This suggests that the considered regions may contain genes controlling the phenotype variation expression of the trait of interest and should be useful under positive selection in subsequent breeding of the oil palm.