**6. New technologies to gain insights on the FY causal agent**

The so-called 'omics' techniques (**Figure 4**) provide new opportunities to study oil palm FY. To get insights on FY possible causal agent, different research groups in Brazil have used metagenomics, metabolomics, and proteomics analysis [20–22]. To our knowledge, no work focusing on transcriptomics and FY has been published yet. The most commonly used approach in these studies is to compare healthy plants (without symptoms of FY) to those showing disease symptoms at different stages of progression. In contrast to more traditional non-molecular studies of FY, these techniques provide a global glimpse of the organism by looking at the associated microbiota (metagenomics), the complete protein content (proteomics), or metabolite content (metabolomics) of cells.
