1. Introduction
Cultivation of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) has
expanded tremendously in recent years and palm oil has
established itself as the leading vegetable oil in the world,
taking over the top position from soybean in 2006 [1]. It is
an extensive commercial crop demanding large tracts of
land for its exploitation.
Knowledge on genetic diversity and genetic relationships
among breeding materials could be an invaluable aid
in crop improvement strategies. The use of molecular
markers has provided important findings in genetic
variability studies. Molecular markers can also be applied
in predicting progeny performance. In a conventional
breeding program, thousands of crosses were made and
tested in extensive field plots. Genetic distance as
measured by molecular data may be useful to predict
good potential crosses, thus reducing the total number of
experimental progenies.
Selection of suitable parents is one of the most
important criteria used to allocate resources for the most
promising crosses and increase the efficiency of breeding
programs. Since hybrid vigor is contributed by genetic
complementation between divergent parents, it can be
assumed that parents with high genetic distance coefficients
have the tendency to produce more vigorous hybrids
[2]. Parents with higher general combining ability and
large genetic distance produce hybrids with better yield
performance [3,4]. Advances in research have generated
interest in predicting progeny performance using molecular
markers.
Microsatellite is one of well-known molecular markers
and known as Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs). It has short
tandem repeat of DNA sequences (2–6 bp) and are highly
polymorphic due to the variation in the number of repeat
units. These are inherited in co-dominant fashion and
highly heritable. Besides that, they are easy to score and
can be produced rapidly using PCR technology. Many
studies have been reported on the uses of microstellite