Plant Focus: Bananas, Flowers, and Mangos

Researchers from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation recently announced the completion of the first phase of sequencing the banana genome.

About 10 percent of the fruit's genome has been mapped, yielding some 40,000 DNA sequences, and another 5,000 genes.

This research advance comes as concern mounts that the Cavendish variety banana crop may be eradicated by disease, as happened to the Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s.

India is the world's largest banana producer with 11 million metric tons grown in 2000, followed by Brazil, with 6.3 million tons, then Ecuador with 5 million tons, according to information at the impressive NationMaster website, which notes that 90 percent of the world's production is for local consumption, not export.

Ecuador is the world's leader in exporting bananas, while the US is the leading consumer, buying some $1.3 billion bananas a year.

According to NationMaster, the concern over the plight of bananas might be a bit, ahem, overripe:

”While the banana industry, including the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA) and the International Network for the Improvement of Bananas and Plantains in France, see the disease as a possible indicator of the demise of the fruit, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) disagrees. According to the industry, because existing banana plants are reproduced from cuttings, there is little genetic diversity and diseases, in particular fungus, can rapidly wipe out entire production regions. But according to the FAO, the export varieties make up only about 10 percent of the total world banana crop, and the produce of small-scale farmers in developing countries, which do not enter significantly into world trade, retain far greater genetic diversity.

The advances in understanding the banana genome are reassuring on one hand, but troubling to those who are concerned about GMOs.

Personally, I'm not much of a banana eater, save for banana pudding (vanilla wafers, pudding and sliced bananas, baked). But, I've worked in plenty of New York offices where bananas are a ubiquitous snack, purchased for a quarter off a fruit cart.

Still, what is interesting about this, in a New Biology Economy framework, is that Brazil is a research leader in the southern hemisphere, which is way under-exploited as a market for molecular biology tools. [See New Biology Economy 7/13/2005 for information about Brazil's research efforts in the coffee genome.]

In other plant news, Arabidopsis researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, in a paper published in the journal Science on Aug. 12, have linked a small molecule present in leaves to the formation of flowers at the growing tip of a plant.

The full picture of this molecular messaging system has yet to be deciphered, but the scientists have determined that the FT and FD proteins in plants are linked to activate flowering.

“Being able to control the flowering process better should help to breed new varieties that can flourish in places where they would normally not flower at the appropriate time,” the researchers said in a statement.

Now, meandering off the science path, and onto the interesting, an article available online from The International Herald Tribune and reprinted from The Asian Age, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, an advisor to India's prime ministers Indira and Rajiv Ghandi, writes lovingly about mangos in India in August.

Mangos are India's national fruit and the number of varieties and the tastes of these fruit are overwhelming when compared to the meager varieties available here.

I'm a big fan of the fruit, especially when it is at its green stage and tart and crunchy. So far, this year I've tasted three varieties – the big green Mexican mangos, the yellow Haitians, and a small mango, the Dominicans in my neighborhood call vanilla.