This Fungus Kills Bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. But There’s Hope

A devastating pandemic has been ravaging bananas for 30 years, but determination could beryllium caller anticipation for the beloved fruit. The crushed for the banana bust is simply a fungus named Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense, which causes a information known either arsenic Panama illness oregon Fusarium Wilt. The pathogen infects banana plants, impeding their vascular strategy and causing the leaves to yellowish and die.

The illness was discovered successful the 1870s and, by the 1950s, had affected each the banana-growing regions of the world. The effect is that “the benignant of banana we devour contiguous is not the aforesaid arsenic the 1 your grandparents ate,” said Li-Jun Ma, a biochemistry prof astatine UMass Amhert, successful a press release. “Those aged ones, the Gros Michel bananas, are functionally extinct.”

Because Gros Michel bananas were astir wholly wiped out, cultivators turned to different taxon of the fruit, the Cavendish. All was good for decades, until 1994, erstwhile the illness started to contiguous itself successful bananas grown successful Taiwan. Since then, Panama illness has erstwhile again gone global, threatening banana crops and, by extension, smoothies everywhere.

But Ma and her colleagues precocious discovered immoderate bully news. In a study published successful Nature Microbiology, they uncover that the mentation of Fusarium oxysporum affecting Cavendish bananas has a antithetic evolutionary root from the 1 that killed disconnected the Gros Michels. The researchers sequenced and compared the genes from 36 strains of Fursarium fungi, including the 1 that was truthful deadly to Gros Michel bananas.

They recovered the Cavendish strain, Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense (Foc) tropical contention 4, oregon TR4 for short, “did not germinate from the contention that decimated the Gros Michel bananas,” said Ma. “TR4’s genome contains immoderate accessory genes that are linked to the accumulation of nitric oxide, which seems to beryllium the cardinal origin successful TR4’s virulence.”

The bully quality is that, erstwhile the 2 genes controlling the accumulation of nitric oxide were unopen off, the virulence of TR4 was greatly reduced. That “opens up galore strategical avenues to mitigate, oregon adjacent control, the dispersed of Foc TR4,” said Yong Zhang, a erstwhile UMass Amhert doctoral pupil who led the research.

Ma warned that, portion this could mean salvation for the Cavendish, growers should diversify the types of bananas they cultivate to amended shield against pathogens, alternatively than relying chiefly connected a azygous variety.

There has been nary connection connected whether the dispersed of TR4 has shaken Kirk Cameron’s unyielding religion successful bananas.