Aquilaria malaccensis polyploids as improved planting materials

Aquilaria malaccensis is an agarwood-producing timber species used in many traditional remedies and modern therapeutic treatments and perfume industries. in this study,we aimed to enhance a. malaccensis phytochemical content through in-vitro polyploidisation. shoot tip and nodal segment from 8-week-old in-vitro a. malaccensis plantlets were treated with different concentrations of colchicine and trifluralin at various exposure times to obtain polyploids. tetraploid plantlets (10%) was obtained using nodal segment explants treated with 0.1 mm trifluralin at 120 hours. chemical profiling of diploid and tetraploid samples (leaf,stem and root) was evaluated separately using headspace-solid phase microextraction (hs-spme) combined with gas chromatograph mass spectrometry (gcms). phytochemical content increased in tetraploid,particularly in stem whereby the total phytochemical contents were 43.19% in tetraploid compared with 5.87% in diploid. the hs-spme-gcms analyses showed that tetraploid stem contained high levels of sesquiterpenoids found in agarwood oil such as α-eudesmol (18.3%),α-gurjunene (8.61%) and γ-gurjunene (6.22%). on the other hand,aromadendrene (2.49%) and α-humulene (3.38%) were detected in diploid samples. tetraploid leaf samples were observed to contain α-humulene (3.79%) while diploid only contained (2e) tridecenol (19%). there were no significant differences between diploid and tetraploid in terms of total phytochemical content in root samples. nevertheless,high sesquiterpenoid content,γ-gurjunene (14.0%),was detected in tetraploid sample while γ-muurolene (2.96%),in diploid. α-guaiene content was higher in root samples of diploid (6.49%) than tetraploid (1.09%). these results demonstrated that tetraploid plantlets led to higher yield of total phytochemical content and might facilitate production of high quality a. malaccensis clones. © forest research institute malaysia.