The Search Is on for Mysterious Banana Ancestors
As we kill off the stuff we’ve gotten used to (i.e., coffee, bananas, humans), we’ve got to find the original sources of these things if we expect to continue to enjoy them. So these seed and source searches have been ubiquitous and important.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Bananas, it turns out, are not what we thought they were.
Sure, most, when ripe, are yellow and sweet and delicious slathered in peanut butter. But a global survey reveals many more appealing counterparts than the generic banana found in American supermarkets, with edible varieties that can be red or blue, squat or bulbous, seeded or seedless.
And the banana family tree as a whole is even more diverse, and mysterious, than previously thought, according to a study published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
“The diversity of bananas is not as well described, as well documented, as we thought,” said Julie Sardos, a botanist at the Bioversity International research group, and an author of the study. “It was really overlooked by past researchers.”
She and her colleagues analyzed genetic material from hundreds of different bananas and found that there were at least three wild banana ancestors not yet discovered by botanists. Like the revelation of a long-lost relative, knowing that these missing wild ancestors are out there could change the way we see bananas and provide potential ways to strengthen the crops against disease.
Wild bananas, or Musa acuminata, have flesh packed with seeds that render the fruit almost inedible. Scientists think bananas were domesticated more than 7,000 years ago on the island of New Guinea. Humans on the island at the time bred the plants to produce fruit without being fertilized and to be seedless. They were able to develop pretty tasty bananas without formal knowledge of the principles of inheritance and evolution.