New technique found to save cavendish banana crops

A group of scientists from the University of Cambridge found a novel way to combat the “Panama disease” that is affecting the world’s banana crops, and which consists of combining two species of this plant, according to an article published this Wednesday in the magazine Nature.

Banana is the fourth largest food crop in the world after wheat, rice and corn in terms of production and the largest exporters of the fruit include Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

99% of the bananas sold globally are of the type called Cavendish, which is susceptible to a deadly fungus called Tropical Race 4 or “Panama disease”, which has been spreading for more than three decades and which, if not contained, it could ruin this industry worth about $ 25 billion annually.

Because bananas are seedless plants, the technique used has been to graft the sprout of one plant onto the root of another.

This procedure was considered impossible, but the team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, discovered that the root and shoot tissues taken from the seeds of monocot grasses, fuse efficiently.

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Scientists believe that the TR4 fungus likely emerged in Southeast Asia in the 1990s and soon spread to the rest of the world. In 2019, a region appeared in Latin America that, combined with the Caribbean, produces 75% of the world’s bananas.

“We have achieved what everyone believed was impossible,” said Julian Hibberd, professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, and lead author of the paper. (I)