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V8 juice and sunshine help banana research

IITA iNew

Fungal spores for Black Sigatoka

A combination of V8 juice and sunshine isn’t just good for the body—it’s also proving useful for early screening of banana and plantain plants to see if they have resistance to one of their most damaging diseases.

Black Sigatoka, also known as black leaf streak (BLS), is common on bananas in sub-Saharan Africa. Caused by a fungus, it can cause yield losses as high as 76%. IITA previously bred resistant plant varieties which halted the spread of the disease in Nigeria, but with time, resistance can break down. Further work is needed to continue finding and building resistance. Field evaluations are one way to test for plant susceptibility to BLS but they can be time consuming and expensive. So IITA scientists are developing a rapid screening process, which will allow resistant types to be identified at a very early stage.

The best way to test for resistance is to try to give the disease to very young plants and then look for the ones that don’t get sick, long before the plants reach full maturity. To produce large quantities of the fungal spores with which to transmit the BLS, IITA researchers used a combination of V8 vegetable juice and near ultraviolet light. It created the most spores for challenging tissue culture plantlets still in test tubes.

Resistant plantlet is in left test tube

So far the research shows that the resistance reaction in test-tube plantlets is as good as in fully grown bananas or plantains.

“These methods will help breeders to rapidly select for resistant plants without having to wait an agonizing two years to find that the plants they were nurturing have to be discarded since they are susceptible to BLS. By selecting the varieties which are most resistant to Black Sigatoka before planting, we are taking further steps to contain the spread of the disease,” says IITA scientist Dr Ranajit Bandyopadhyay.

Future work will focus on refining the screening method and determining the relationship between early screening results and adult plant reaction. A newly acquired facility for screening in the greenhouse also means that tests can take place on a larger scale, ensuring that resistant plants can more quickly benefit farmers in the fields.

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Article courtesy IITA iNEW

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