Researchers have gone bananas over this fruit ’s complex ancestry

People like to know where their food comes from, but even experts are throwing up their hands when it comes to the origins of the modern banana. An extensive genetic analysis of more than 100 varieties of wild and cultivated bananas unpeels the fruit’s tangled history of domestication and reveals the existence of three previously unknown—and possibly still living—ancestors. Banana experts want to track down those mysterious forebears to see whether their genes might help keep modern banana crops healthy. “Banana domestication is much more complicated than I had realized previously,” says Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who was not involved in the study. About 7000 years ago, bananas were not the seedless, fleshy fruits we know today. The flesh was pitted with black seeds and nearly inedible. Instead, people ate the banana tree’s flowers or its underground tubers. They also stripped fibers from the trunklike stem to make rope and clothes. Banana trees back then were “very far from the bananas we see in people’s fields today,” says Julie Sardos, a genetic resources scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International, which stockpiles banana varieties. Scientists do know the banana’s predominant wild ancestor is a species named Musa acuminata , which occurs from India to Australia. Most researchers agree that Papua New Guinea is where domesticated bananas as we know the...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news