Banana Breeding Brought Back
Banana hybrids can more than double the yield of best parents. Progressive heterobeltiosis for bunch weight in bred ‘Matooke’ banana hybrids (NARITAs). A: ‘Entukura’ (3x female grandparent), B: ‘1438K-1’ (4x female parent) and C: ‘NARITA 17’ (3x hybrid).
About 20 years ago, three banana breeders working for the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Uganda died when their plane crashed into the sea off West Africa. And soon after, the man widely regarded as one of the world's top banana breeders, Phil Rowe, died in Honduras. This left us globally with only a handful of banana breeders. Aggravating the situation, global banana production is seriously threatened today by a soil-borne Fusarium strain TR4, once it takes hold, can destroy an entire crop yield.
All major staple crops, fruits and vegetables have substantial investment in breeding to increase agricultural productivity, improve pest and disease resistance and ensure food security. Seed companies invest on average about 15% of its sales into breeding and research and some acting in high-tech markets invest close to 25%. Not the case for bananas. With few breeders left, breeding investments were limited and most of the R&D investments in bananas went to biotech and gene editing technologies, integrated pest management, preventive and phytosanitary measures.
On the other hand, banana breeding is super challenging. It is a seedless fruit and is basically an infertile mutant cousin of wild Musa species. The absence of seeds makes its fruit edible, but also genetically vulnerable as making crosses, selecting plants and collecting seeds is virtually impossible. Bananas have survived only because for some 10,000 years farmers and commercial producers have propagated the fruit by taking shoots from the base of the plants. Each cutting is thus a genetic clone. The world's 500 or so banana varieties are genetically almost identical and therefore highly prone to new diseases on the world's banana plantations.
With 10 billion US$ per year, bananas are the world’s most exported fresh fruit and nearly 90 percent of the bananas eaten around the world are grown for local consumption in backyards and on small plots in developing countries. And therefore, this recent paper of IITA researchers is an important step forward for banana breeding and the banana sector overall.
Hybrid crops are expected to have higher edible yields than their parents, but by how much? A team of IITA researchers comparing the performance of the East Africa Highland banana, locally known as ‘Matooke’, found that some hybrids had bunch weights that were up to two and a half times heavier than those of their best performing parents. “Today’s banana cultivation yields 5 to 30 t/ha/year while new hybrids and improved agronomy can yield upto 70 t/ha/year”, predicts Rony Swennen, Banana breeder at IITA and Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. “These excellent results will help to select superior material and thus increase breeding efficiency. It seems that more than ever, banana breeding is possible, it is back and here to stay. “
Congratulations to the team Michael Batte, Moses Nyine, Brigitte Uwimana, Rony Swennen, Violet Akech, Allan Brown, Helena Persson Hovmalm, Mulatu Geleta and Rodomiro Ortiz. We are looking forward to new results and breeding material that will increase yield and in the end build up long-term resistance to devastating diseases such as Fusarium.
https://www.iita.org/news-item/banana-hybrids-can-more-than-double-the-yield-of-best-parents/
https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/banana-hybrids-can-more-than-double-the-yield-of-best-parents/
https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12870-020-02667-y
