Basal stem rot (BSR) is a devastating disease to Malaysian oil palm. Current techniques employed for BSR disease detection on oil palm are laborious, time consuming, costly, and subjected to accuracy limitations. An ergosterol detection method was developed, whereby it correlated well with the degree of infection in oil palm. This current study was designed to study the relationship between Ganoderma biomass, ergosterol concentration, BSR disease progress and to validate the efficiency of microwave assisted extraction (MAE) method for extraction of ergosterol compound. In addition, testing on the sensitivity of thin layer chromatography (TLC) analysis for detection of ergosterol was also the aim of this study. The optimised procedure involved extracting a small amount of Ganoderma-infected oil palm root tissues suspended in low volumes of solvent followed by irradiation in a conventional microwave oven at 70°C and medium high power for 30 s, resulting in simultaneous extraction and saponification. Based on the results obtained, MAE method may be effective in extracting low to high yields of ergosterol from infected oil palm roots demonstrating disease scale 2, 3 and 4. Positive relationship was observed between ergosterol content and inoculation period starting day 3 in the inoculated oil palm seedlings and hour 6 in germinated seeds. TLC analysis demonstrated a good correlation with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) quantification. Therefore, a semi-quantitative TLC analysis may be applied for handling a large amount of samples during onset field survey.
In Malaysia, rice mutant varieties that are genetically altered to confer resistance against blast disease have been substantially developed through mutational breeding program. However, due to the limited accessible information on the mutant lines, mutant gene variants corresponding to the disease resistance and other useful agronomic traits are yet to be exploited. Here, we conducted whole genome re-sequencing of blast resistance with kernel elongation traits in mutant line, Mahsuri Mutant (87,639,446 bp raw reads), and its parental line, Mahsuri (85,156,783 bp raw reads) using Illumina Novaseq 6000 sequencing platform with 30x sequencing coverage. The generated genome sequences are aimed to facilitate the discovery of causal mutation and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related to the intended traits. The identified SNPs can be further employed to develop allele-specific SNP molecular markers to locate the mutant gene regions. The NGS data obtained (FASTQ format) of the parental and mutant lines have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database under sequence read archive (SRA) xwith accession numbers SRR24388814 (Mahsuri) and SRR22952097 (Mahsuri Mutant) respectively.