The strain began destroying banana crops in the 1990s in Asia before invading Australia and countries in the Middle East and Africa. That has helped TR4 slowly spread around the world, probably by hitching rides on contaminated equipment or in soil. It can’t be killed with fungicides, and it can linger in soil for up to 30 years. Rodomiro Ortiz, a plant geneticist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, says that no naturally occurring banana species has the qualities that have made the Cavendish so popular and the ability to resist TR4.Īnd the fungus is a tough opponent. By the 1960s, big banana growers such as Chiquita, now based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were switching to the Cavendish.Īlarm as devastating banana fungus reaches the Americas But farmers had a backup in the Cavendish, which was resistant to TR1, tough enough to withstand handling during export and had a broadly acceptable texture and taste. In the first half of the 1900s, another strain of the Fusarium fungus called TR1 nearly wiped out the era’s top banana, the Gros Michel. This isn’t the first time that a commercial banana variety has faced extinction. “Then Colombia declared a national emergency,” Dale says, “and now the amount of interest is through the roof.” An appealing alternative James Dale, a biotechnologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, started getting enquiries about his genetically modified (GM) bananas in July, as the first rumours surfaced that TR4 had reached Colombia. The variety accounts for 99% of global banana shipments. So the only way to save the Cavendish may be to tweak its genome, says Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida in Homestead. Researchers are also turning to the powerful, precise gene-editing tool CRISPR to boost the Cavendish’s resilience against the fungus, known as Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4).īreeding TR4 resistance into the Cavendish using conventional methods isn’t possible because the variety is sterile and propagated by cloning. A team in Australia has inserted a gene from wild bananas into the top commercial variety - known as the Cavendish - and are currently testing these modified bananas in field trials. Scientists are using a mix of approaches to save the banana. The invasion has given new urgency to efforts to create fruit that can withstand the scourge. The Colombian government confirmed last month that a banana-killing fungus has invaded the Americas - the source of much of the world’s banana supply. The race to engineer the next-generation banana is on. Workers inspect a banana harvest at a farm in Australia.
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