The bananas you enjoy in the morning, with your cereal, smoothies, with a scoop of peanut butter, in your banana bread, or just on their own, are facing extinction due to a fungal disease known as fusarium oxysporum, also called TR4.
Specifically, it’s affecting the Cavendish bananas, the world’s most popular type of banana, attacking its roots and causing the plant to rot and die. Without intervention, we really are facing a world with very few bananas, if any at all, in the very near future. But luckily for all of us, it appears one group of super scientists may have an answer.
As the BBC previously reported, for more than three decades, the fungus has affected banana crops around the globe. However, over the last decade, the fungus has accelerated and moved to new regions, including Latin America, where much of the global north’s bananas are grown.
“Bananas are undeniably among the most important fruits in the world and are a major staple food for millions of consumers,” Fernando García-Bastidas, a researcher in plant health, shared with BBC. “We cannot underestimate the impact the current TR4 pandemic could have on food security.”
However, now it appears scientists have found a potential solution.
In August, a global team of researchers unveiled their latest findings in the journal Nature Microbiology. It first showed that this strain of TR4 is not the same one that nearly wiped out bananas in the 1950s, which is an important baseline to understand.
“The kind of banana we eat today is not the same as the one your grandparents ate. Those old ones, the Gros Michel bananas, are functionally extinct, victims of the first Fusarium outbreak in the 1950s.” Li-Jun Ma, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, shared in a press release about the study.
Today, the most popular banana, the team explained, is the Cavendish, which was initially bred to be disease-resistant due to the previous extinction. And for a while, it was. “There was another outbreak of banana wilt,” Yong Zhang, lead author and PhD graduate from UMass Amherst’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program under Ma’s direction, added. “It spread like wildfire from South-East Asia to Africa and Central America.”
Ma and his students spent the last 10 years studying and attempting to learn why this new outbreak occurred. They found that this new outbreak was due to “strain-specific accessory genes” in addition to a shared core genome and are linked to the production of nitric oxide, which Ma said “seems to be the key factor in TR4’s virulence.”
While the researchers expressly stated that they don’t know exactly why this has contributed to a new disease infestation, they were able to determine that the virulence of the new strain is “greatly” reduced when two genes that “control nitric oxide production were eliminated.”
“Identifying these accessory genetic sequences opens up many strategic avenues to mitigate or even control, the spread of Foc TR4,” Yong added. However, even if you can control the genes that produce nitric oxide, the authors noted, the most pressing concern is actually monocropping — the practice of growing the same crop year over year in the same field.
“When there’s no diversity in a huge commercial crop, it becomes an easy target for pathogens,” Ma said. Ma even suggested a way you can make a difference and help the survival of bananas for future generations: “Next time you’re shopping for bananas, try some different varieties that might be available in your local specialty foods store.” Go ahead and try the Gros Michel Banana, the Nam Wah Banana, the Mysore Banana, and others to help all bananas everywhere. This way, you’re encouraging farmers to grow something new and still make a living in the process.
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