Functional Genomic Study of Acacia Hybrids for Wood Pulp Enhancement
(Collaborative project with UKM, FRIM and TropBio Research Sdn Bhd)
Tropical Acacia species are fast growing environmentally tolerant trees able to rehabilitate marginal and degraded lands (such as saline and alkaline soils and ex-mining lands) and highly suitable for forest plantations, especially for craft pulp and neutral sulphite semichemical (NSSC) pulp. The ASEAN region has an estimated 600,000 hectares of plantations of tropical Acacia species and there is a growing demand for improved planting materials, particularly with improved lignin quality for pulping. This project aims to use various aspects of genetic studies to explore the genome of Acacia hybrids (A. mangium x A. auriculiformis) for the enhancement of wood pulp quality. The studies involve generation of large number of expressed sequence tags (EST) in conjunction with the construction of a genetic linkage map of Acacia hybrid aimed towards identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for wood pulp quality that can be used for marker-assisted selection (MAS) in Acacia hybrids.
Principal Investigators at MUST
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