Musa International Transit Centre

Bioversity's International Transit Centre (ITC) is home to the world’s largest collection of banana and plantain germplasm - the International Musa Germplasm Collection. Its mission? To contribute to the secure long-term conservation of the entire Musa genepool and keep genetic resources in the public domain.

Why is the Musa collection important?

Domesticated bananas and plantains do not produce seeds, and the seeds produced by wild species are difficult to conserve.

For richer people, a banana is just a delicious piece of fruit, the favourite fruit of much of the developed world. For the poor, across the tropics, bananas and plantains are a vital staple food.

In Uganda, for example, the word matooke means both “banana” and “food”. Bananas are also an important source of income for millions of small-scale farmers.

Yet these are just some of the threats.

• In the highlands of East Africa, yields have been declining steadily as a result of population pressure, which means that farmers cannot leave their banana lands fallow for long enough to regenerate fertility, and the spread of pests and diseases.

• Banana xanthomonas wilt, a bacterial disease, has been romping through farmers’ fields.It can be managed, but farmers need to be trained and that takes resources.

• In Asia, a virulent new strain of Panama Disease has emerged, and the fungus, which wiped out almost all commercial plantations in the 1950s, is threatening small-scale farmers.

And the very thing that makes bananas and plantains so attractive to eat – that they have no seeds – results in two big drawbacks.

1 - all plants of a particular variety are genetically identical, meaning they are all equally vulnerable.

2 - it is very difficult to breed new varieties. The diversity stored and distributed by the ITC helps farmers and researchers to find the qualities they need to meet the growing threats to bananas and plantains.

The genetic diversity kept at the ITC collection is checked for the presence of pathogens, such as bacteria, fungi and viruses before being made available for distribution and there is an ongoing programme of research to find therapies for the few viruses that are harder to eliminate.

A collection in trust

The entire collection is held in trust for the benefit of future generations. For backup and safety reasons, over 60% is also frozen to 196c, the temperature of liquid nitrogen, in a process called cryopreservation.

This arrests both the growth of plant cells and the biological deterioration processes so that material can be preserved indefinitely and resuscitated into fully viable banana plants as needed. For extra security, the entire collection is progressively duplicated and stored it at the Institut de Recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France.

A collection in use

Between 1985 and 2007, the ITC distributed 8353 samples of accessions to external users in 103 countries. 75% of the samples go to people and institutions in the main banana growing regions – Africa (27%) the Americas (25%) and Asia and Pacific (23%) with the remainder going to universities and research centres in Europe.

A recent impact assessment study  [1] showed that users of the centre see the ITC as central to the conservation of Musa germplasm on a global level. They especially appreciate that the material is virus indexed and documented. Many also indicated that it was the only free source of germplasm, an important factor especially for scientists from national research agricultural research institutions in developing countries.

Obtaining or depositing material

Most accessions acquired by the genebank are held in trust for the benefit of humanity. They are conserved under the conditions of an agreement signed between Bioversity and the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture  [2], which places them in the Multilateral System of Access and Benefit Sharing  [3].