DOHA: The Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) and the Ministry of Environment’s Biotechnology Center have launched the Date Palm Research Programme to establish Qatar as an international leader in date palm research. The goal of this new international collaborative project is to increase Qatar’s lead in date palm research further, advancing basic, applied and human health research into this national resource and establishing a nucleus for a future Qatar Institute of Date Palm Research. Date palm horticulture has been practiced in the Middle East for thousands of years. The fruit is an essential part of the daily diet in the Arab world and play a central role at Iftar during Ramadan. Dates amounting to 19,844 metric tonnes per year in 2005 although production is decreasing
WCMC-Q and the Biotechnology Center have already made a remarkable contribution to date palm research the past few years. In 2008, WCMC-Q’s Genomics Laboratory mapped the date palm genome for the first time. In 2010, the research team identified the region of the genome that is linked to gender, making it possible to quickly and easily classify male and female seedlings - information that has huge significance for the cultivation and propagation of the palms. The inaugural meeting of the research programme on October 2 was held via video-conferencing at WCMC-Q with leading scientists in Qatar, France and Germany.
The meeting was chaired by Dr Joel Malek, Director of Genomics at WCMC-Q; Masoud Al Marri, Director of the Biotechnology Center; and Dr Karsten Suhre, Lead Principal Investigator and WCMC-Q’s Director of Metabolomics. Local partners in the project include Dr Ali El Kharboutly, Biotechnology Consultant at the Biotechnology Center; Dr Emad Hussain Al Turaihi, Agricultural Expert at the Ministry of Environment’s Department of Agriculture; and Amer Fayed Al Khis, Research Engineer at the Department of Agriculture. The project has received financial support of $4.5m from Qatar National Research Fund and will run for a period of five years The Peninsula
