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Their ubiquity may lead you to believe otherwise, but bananas are under threat — for the second time in recent history. The bananas we depend on today for breakfast on the go, a quick snack or sustenance aren’t the same ones people relied on before the 1950s. The first outbreak of the fungal disease Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB) decimated the Gros Michel variety and is poised to do the same to the Cavendish, the world’s most popular commercially available type.
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The banana apocalypse may be near, but according to research published in Nature Microbiology, an international team of scientists led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made a discovery that might be the key to slowing or even controlling the spread of disease.
“The kind of banana we eat today is not the same as the one your grandparents ate. Those old ones, the Gros Michel bananas, are functionally extinct, victims of the first Fusarium outbreak in the 1950s,” Li-Jun Ma, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, said in a statement.
FWB kills plants by blocking the flow of water and nutrients, causing discolouration and wilting. In the 1950s, it destroyed nearly all banana plantations in Central and South America, and plant biologists developed the Fusarium-resistant Cavendish to replace the Gros Michel. It thrived until the 1990s when a new strain started to spread.
The second outbreak “spread like wildfire from Southeast Asia to Africa and Central America,” said lead author Yong Zhang, a postdoctoral research associate at UMass Amherst.
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“Thousands of hectares of Cavendish have already been destroyed, and many will follow if we are unable to stop Fusarium wilt,” according to Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, which wasn’t involved in the Nature Microbiology paper.
The team of researchers from China, South Africa and the U.S. have studied the current outbreak of banana wilt for the past 10 years, sequencing and comparing 36 Fusarium strains, including those that infected Gros Michel bananas. They discovered that the pathogen behind the second outbreak, tropical race 4 (TR4), didn’t evolve from the same strain that wiped out the Gros Michel bananas. “TR4’s genome contains some accessory genes that are linked to the production of nitric oxide, which seems to be the key factor in TR4’s virulence,” Ma explained.
Though their discovery “opens up many strategic avenues to mitigate, or even control, the spread” of Fusarium TR4, the banana’s greatest threat is monocropping, says Ma. As was the case with the Gros Michel before it, raising a single Cavendish crop increases the risk of disease. Promoting greater diversity is critical. “Next time you’re shopping for bananas, try some different varieties that might be available in your local specialty foods store.”
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