one banana two banana three banana no more

[Guest guest]

No sex please, we're bananas

By Leigh Dayton

January 16, 2003

 

THE poor banana. It hasn't had sex in 10,000 years, it's sterile, subject to

dire diseases, and could be as extinct as the dodo within a decade.

 

At least, that's what a Belgian plant pathologist claims today in New Scientist

magazine.

 

According to Emile Frison, head of the International Network for the Improvement

of Banana and Plantain at Montpellier in France, the edible banana is doomed

because it lacks genetic diversity.

 

Without diversity, the banana cannot evolve resistance to pests and fungus

diseases now threatening crops around the world. Plant geneticists and breeders

also have little to tinker with in their quest for resistant varieties.

 

To top it off, the world's commercial growers rely heavily on a single variety,

the cavendish banana, whose predecessor, the gros michel, was wiped out

worldwide by a soil fungus in the 1950s.

 

" Emile is quite right. The cavendish in particular has a problem, " said Steward

Lindsay, a horticulturist with the Queensland Department of Primary Industries

in South Johnstone. " Large-scale long-term monoculture of bananas has problems,

regardless of their genetics. "

 

The banana's basic problem is its sex life or lack thereof.

 

All modern varieties - from sweet lady fingers to the standard cavendish - are

clones of parent plants that diverged from a single seedless ancestor roughly

10,000 years ago in Vietnam.

 

Because they are seedless, bananas are sterile. They reproduce " vegetatively " ,

with each generation the same as the last. " Vietnamese villagers went out and

found a freak of nature with three sets of chromosomes, not two, so it was

sterile " said Mr Lindsay.

 

To cultivate their edible but sterile find, those early growers planted cuttings

from the ancestral banana. The cuttings grew into plants able to produce more

seedless fruit, along with underground shoots that grew into more plants.

 

But the cavendish aside, Mr Lindsay doesn't think all bananas are doomed: " No,

never. There will always be bananas. "

 

The Australian

[Guest guest]

And, of course, bananas are the best selling fruit - big money - so the gm

companies would love to get hold of the copyrights!

 

Jo

one banana two banana three banana no more

 

 

> No sex please, we're bananas

> By Leigh Dayton

> January 16, 2003

 

 

 

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