The Taiwan Banana Research Institute has developed a Panama disease-resistant banana variety, Tai-Chiao No. 9 (TC9), which is expected to change the global banana supply landscape.
Bananas are an economically important fruit crop to the world, and Taiwan-developed disease-resistant bananas are recognized by experts as a fortress variety to safeguard bananas globally.
A research team formed by Academia Sinica’s Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center associate researcher Chen Ho-ming (陳荷明) and the institute in collaboration with researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU) found that the deletion of certain chromosomal segments in Taiwanese bananas significantly increased their resistance to Panama disease.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Banana Research Institute
The institute continued to utilize the findings to cultivate the new disease-resistance banana variety, TC9, with the goal of bringing it to the global market.
Established by the Ministry of Agriculture, the institute is one of the most important banana research institutions in the world and has developed several banana varieties that can resist tropical race 4 (TR4) — a race of Panama disease known as a “terminal illness” for bananas.
Bananas infected with TR4 could cause the whole plantation to wither, while the pathogenic fungi would incubate in the soil for decades.
Institute director Chiu Chu-ying (邱祝櫻) yesterday said that NTU plant pathology and microbiology professor Su Hong-ji (蘇鴻基) in 1967 unveiled the linkage between the TR4 fungus and Panama disease, and began to develop its disease spectrum by conducting tissue culture and seedling propagation.
The institute has for decades been screening for banana seedlings with disease resistance by mixing them with viruses and has previously identified Panama disease-resistant varieties such as Tai-Chiao No. 4, Tai-Chiao No. 5 and Tai-Chiao No. 7, she said.
Chen started collaborating with the institute 10 years ago to identify key differences between varieties with and without disease resistance by analyzing the genome, transcriptome and gene functions.
Most Panama disease-resistant Taiwanese banana varieties were found to have certain large chromosomal segments deleted, he said.
Such deletions significantly boosted the bananas’ resistance to Panama disease, Chen said.
These findings proved that structural variations in chromosomes played a crucial role in mutation-based banana breeding and could be used as actionable genomic targets for precise disease resistance breeding in the future, he said, adding that relevant studies were already published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America journal.
Chen is analyzing TC9’s molecular markers, but has yet to reveal the matter to the public given the major agricultural commercial interests involved, while the ministry has applied for its plant breeders’ rights.
Williams is the primary global commercial banana variety, largely grown in the Philippines and Latin America, but almost unable to resist Panama disease, Chiu said.
TC9 is a cultivar developed based on Williams and has at least 70 percent resistance to Panama disease, she said.
Although TC9’s plant breeders’ rights have been approved in Taiwan, a worldwide deployment of plant breeders’ rights obtained from other countries must be completed before exporting the cultivar’s seedlings, Chiu said.
Bananas can reproduce asexually and technical leakage likely would happen if the newly developed variety’s banana sprouts are stolen, she said.
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