Cavendish Bananas Gmo

July 02, 2021

Bananas are probably of. Unfortunately for the banana industry Tropical Race.

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This has happened before.

Cavendish bananas gmo. Each year humans consume an estimated 100 billion bananas making bananas one of the worlds largest crops after wheat rice and corn. Iron and Vitamins are useful for nourishment For example the GM banana project in Uganda was developed to fortify bananas with vitamin and mineral content to help mitigate the undernourishment and the diseases associated with it. The Cavendish banana is the most widely grown banana cultivar in the world.

The banana industry was forced to develop a replacement for that banana called Cavendish which now accounts for almost half of all bananas grown in the world today and virtually all those eaten in the US. But by the middle of the 20th century Gros Michel bananas were wiped out by an. Every single Cavendish banana is genetically EXACTLY the same.

Before the Cavendish the Gros Michels or Big Mike was the markets banana of choice. But bananas werent always big bright and yellow they likely got their start as a browner smaller fruit around 8000 BC grown only in Southeast Asia and Papua New. The major banana producers such as Dole dont appear to be.

Right now Dales research on GMO bananas is almost the only hope that science has to making the Cavendish cultivar resistant to TR4 without changing the other characteristics like taste texture and transportability. With 15 million to develop GMo bananas for saving Indian women from childbirth death due to iron deficiency. Kikulwe et al 2008.

These fruits are ubiquitous cheaply available year-round in fresh form. This homogeneity of species is very risky. Buy a banana and it will almost certainly be descended from one plant grown at an English stately home.

The Indian Department of Biotechnology has signed an. The GMO Matooke banana. However it too is now under threat from both.

They are clones of a single banana. The Matooke banana is a cooking banana which is also a staple food in Uganda. Hence the GMO Cavendish banana is promoted as the solution by the biotech industry as its supposed to be resistant to the fungal disease.

The Cavendish banana has proved popular among producers and exporters for its high yields and durability over long transportation. It was similar to the Cavendish banana and enjoyed by many millions of people. A GMO version of the Matooke banana also known as the East African Highland banana is being promoted in Uganda by the Gates Foundation.

The main problem is there is no effective way to treat for Panama disease in bananas. Plantations devoted to this banana can be found in Latin America Africa and Southeast Asia and the bulk of bananas on the shelves of Western supermarkets are Cavendish bananas. Moreover unlike with say corn or alfalfa theres no chance of a GMO Cavendish spreading genetic material to wild or non-GMO bananas because the Cavendish is sterile.

Just last year James Dale at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia reported hed created strains of TR4-resistant Cavendish. Every new banana plant has to be manually planted using a piece of existing banana roots. So the Gros Michel banana was quickly replaced in the fields with Cavendish which was immune to TR1.

But it wasnt always the in banana. Our commercial bananas which are for the most part the Cavendish variety have been specially bred over the years so that they are seedless triploids three sets of genes instead of just two that do not form mature seeds. Every Cavendish banana is the same.

Race 1 killed off the majority of the Big Mike but there are still plantations in certain parts of the globe. In the 1950s people ate a type of banana called the Gros Michel. Back to wild Bananas Banana before GMO.

The Cavendish banana is the most widely-grown banana cultivar. They are all clones descendants of one single banana. If a disease infects the Cavendish all could be affected very quickly.

But now we face losing one of the worlds best-loved fruits. This isnt the first time bananas have encountered such parasites. Biotechnologist James Dale and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane Australia cloned a resistance gene named RGA2 from a type of wild banana.

Vitamin A and iron deficiencies are endemic in Uganda affecting women and children. An ABC interview with Dr Dale had the caption The iron-rich bananas will help prevent childbirth deaths in India. How did the Cavendish banana come to dominate the globe and will it be around for much longer.

Regrettably Dale is one of the very few researchers looking into GMO bananas for resistance to TR4. It was top banana until the 1960s due to obliteration by a similar strain of the fungus - known as Panama disease race 1. The Cavendish banana is available in nearly every supermarket and is so widespread because its hardy and easy to cultivate.

But because Cavendish bananas are sterile there was zero chance that any stray GM-banana DNA would end up in another plant.

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