STUDY ON EARLY SCREENING OF GANODERMA DISEASE SUSCEPTIBILITY/TOLERANCE IN PRE-NURSERY POT-TRAY SYSTEM - PART 2 (RELATIONSHIP OF SCREENED OIL PALM PROGENY TOWARDS GANODERMA TOLERANCE AND LIGNOCELLULOSIC CONTENT)

Screening of Ganoderma disease tolerant oil palm progenies may provide a practical solution towards basal stem rot, a major disease affecting the oil palm industries of Malaysia and Indonesia. Through the method developed in an earlier paper (part 1), Ganoderma tolerant oil palm planting material was successfully identified among different oil palm progenies through pre-nursery pot-tray system. In this study, reported in the present paper (part 2), the root lignocellulosic content of 35-week-old control seedlings from 19 progenies tested in the earlier paper (part 1) were determined. Based on the results, the summation of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin contents had a significant correlation (p < 0.05) with average days from first symptom to confirmed death (DTD) whereas cellulose was seen to be weakly correlated with average days from inoculation to first symptom (DTFS) at p-value < 0.10. However, lignin content in roots were not significantly correlated with any of the parameters used to characterise tolerance and resistance of inoculated plants in Ganoderma tolerance. The present result indicates that the lignin content of healthy control seedlings planted without Ganoderma inoculation is not a dependable parameter to characterise the tolerance of a progeny towards Ganoderma. Keywords: Ganoderma disease, root lignocellulosic content, correlation.