It’s all in the name - conserving bananas in the Pacific region

The edible kinds of bananas do not produce seeds. This means that the safest way to conserve bananas, short of freezing them in liquid nitrogen, is to maintain them as tissue-culture plantlets in test tubes.

As curators of such genebanks cannot observe the plants, they are unable to confirm or refute the information given about their identity, at the time of their introduction. So the names they have for the plants in their care may sometimes obscure the fact that they are related or are, in fact, the same variety.       

For example, Iholena, Maoli and Popoulu are three types of bananas found only in the Pacific region. Their names reflect the Hawaiian name of the most important variety in each group, and have become entrenched in the system that scientists use to classify different types of bananas.

Farmers, however, are not bound by such conventions. They use local names, which they pass on when a variety is collected to be conserved in a genebank. This multiplicity of names makes it difficult to identify potential duplicates in a genebank collection - a difficulty that is compounded by the different morphological characteristics shown by plants in different growing environments.

A regional field collection for the Pacific being set up in French Polynesia will help resolve these synonym issues and, in the process, assist genebank curators when making decisions on which accessions to conserve.

Growing the plants side-by-side in the same environmental conditions will make it possible to identify which ones are identical and which ones are different. Having a large sample of diversity in the same place will also help taxonomists classify the varieties into groups. Finally, the data that will be collected on the plants’ agronomic performance will be fed back to the global information system on bananas to facilitate their use.

The regional collection started as a national collection established at the Ministry of Agriculture’s research station in Papara on the island of Tahiti. It was designated as the regional field collection as part of a Bioversity-managed project on conserving banana diversity for use in perpetuity funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust  [3]. The regional field collection is working in partnership with the regional in vitro collection managed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Commission (SPC) in Fiji, which maintains material received from member countries for distribution in the region.

The regional collections are also linked with Bioversity’s International Transit Centre (ITC)  [4] in Belgium - the world’s largest collection of banana and plantain germplasm, hosted by the Catholic University of Leuven.  The SPC and ITC are providing virus-free accessions of Pacific bananas to the field collection, including Fei bananas, another type of banana unique to the region.

This regional collaboration is part of a global effort to conserve banana genetic resources and promote their use being implemented by the MusaNet network  [5], coordinated by Bioversity.

For more information about bananas, why not check out the community of experts at Promusa   [6]