Issue Date : June Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Abstract As it is observed that the banana production is plagued by numerous disease conditions and inflicting large loss to the poor farmers.
Vijayakumar Authors A. Athiraja View author publications. View author publications. Additional information Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article. But it is already in Africa, after being spotted in Mozambique.
A diseased plant will look healthy for up to a year before it shows the tell-tale signs of stained yellow, wilting leaves. In other words, by the time you spot it, it is too late, the disease will likely have already spread via spores in the soil on boots, plants, machines or animals. In his worst nightmare came true — the call came in from a farm in Colombia.
Banana plants were showing wilted yellow leaves and wanted to send him samples. For a very long time I could not sleep well. It was heart-breaking. Like every other country with TR4, Colombia is now trying to slow the outbreak as the world nervously watches for signs of the disease in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Since there is no cure, all that can be done is to quarantine the infected farms and enforce biosecurity measures such as disinfecting boots and preventing the movement of plants between farms.
In other words, the banana equivalent to washing your hands and social distancing. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is also supporting ongoing transgenic research.
However, despite strong scientific evidence that GM foods are safe, the banana is unlikely to be on a supermarket shelf near you anytime soon as regulators and the public remain suspicious. Tests are only just being developed to track TR4 as bananas have suffered from less research funding than other staple crops. He points out there are hundreds of bananas with the potential for cultivation around the world.
Why not use them? Already in countries like India, Indonesia and the Philippines people eat tens of different varieties of bananas, all of which offer different tastes, smells and sizes. But they are difficult to grow and export on the scale of the Cavendish, which has been bred to withstand transport across the oceans. The best hope is for a resistant banana for export to emerge in the next five to 10 years. But it is not a silver bullet.
After facing not one, but two pandemics in the last century, this time the banana industry has to look at more than just introducing another clone. Dan Bebber, associate professor of ecology at the University of Exeter, has spent the last three years studying the challenges to the banana supply system as part of a UK government-funded project BananEx. He says the best way for the banana industry to survive TR4 is to change how bananas are farmed.
At the moment the Cavendish bananas are grown on a vast monoculture, meaning not just TR4 but all diseases spread fast. During one growing season, bananas can be sprayed with fungicides from 40 to 80 times.
One team of researchers has already used the method to successfully add a gene to increase its resistance. The research was published in the journal Communications Biology. Crispr-Cas9 is a tool for making precise edits in DNA, discovered in bacteria. The technique involves a DNA cutting enzyme and a small tag which tells the enzyme where to cut.
By editing this tag, scientists are able to target the enzyme to specific regions of DNA and make precise cuts, wherever they like. In this way, researchers can precisely turn off specific genes in the genome.
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Argos AO. Privacy Policy Feedback. Banana-killing VIRUS is threatening to wipe out the popular fruit as scientists claim gene-editing is the only thing that could save them from extinction Banana streak virus is threatening some wild varieties of banana It infects and embeds in the DNA of the fruit and lies dormant waiting to strike Under stressful conditions, such as drought or extreme heat, it decimates plants The virus is then capable of wiping out entire plantations of bananas Gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 has been able to remove and destroy the virus By Joe Pinkstone For Mailonline Published: GMT, 31 January Updated: GMT, 31 January e-mail shares.
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