The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis. Jacq) is classifiable into two types based on its fruit color pigmentation—virescens, and nigrescens. Virescent fruits are green at the early stage, and then turn bright orange after ripening. Meanwhile, the nigrescent fruit color is dark purple during fruit formation and soon becomes red and purple after ripening. The heredity of virescent traits is favorable in detecting the ripeness of oil palm fruit bunches. The presented study determined the genetic structure characteristics of oil palms in the Nigerian and Angolan populations based on the Virescens (Vir) gene sequence. The 202 palm landraces used included 172 from Angola and 30 from Nigeria (1X and 5X). The young tissues of each palm served for DNA extraction. DNA analysis used a single fragment of a Vir gene, totaling 180 bp of DNA sequence. The results showed that a specific haplotype was prominent in the Nigerian and Angolan populations. The average genetic distance of the population was 0.0031 ± 0.0010. However, the highest genetic distance resulted in the Nigerian population 1X (0.0058 ± 0.0022). The lowest one was in the Angolan population (0.0024 ± 0.0012). The landraces were similar in several haplotypes; however, the Angolan population had more haplotypes than the Nigerian population. The Neighbor-Joining phylogenetic tree showed that landraces clustered based on their haplotypes, but this classification did not match the population.
Nigerian and Angolan oil palm (E. guineensis), diversity, fruit color, genetic distance, Vir gene, DNA sequencing
The results indicated that fruit color-specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) characterized the oil palm (E. guineensis) diversity; however, it did not form a cluster in the population.