Under the peel

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The recent publication by Belgian and Malaysian scientists of a draft Musa balbisiana genome sequence in BMC Genomics went largely unnoticed, at least compared to the media attention that surrounded last year’s publication of the Musa acuminata genome sequence. The media may have a limited appetite for banana genomics but not Musa scientists. They knew from the beginning that the so-called A genome was not the whole story. No sooner had its sequence been released that French and Chinese scientists were discussing joining forces to produce a reference sequence for the edible banana’s other founding genome, the B genome donated by Musa balbisiana, which is often associated with tolerance to abiotic stresses. It looks as if they have been beaten to the finish line, but the fact is that the two scientific teams were pursuing different strategies.

The first issue of Musarama (a discontinued INIBAP newsletter not to be confused with ProMusa’s image bank) compared looking for articles on bananas in books of abstracts to gold panning. Finding nuggets of information became easier with the publication of bibliographies on bananas, such as the ones inserted into Musarama starting in 1988. Three years later, the Musalit database was set up but these were still early days for the Internet. Musarama continued to be the only outlet for bibliographical records until Musalit joined the web in 1998. From that point on its search interface remained more or less the same even as online searches were becoming increasingly powerful. But who has the time and patience to sift through the 194,000 hits of a Google Scholar search on the word bananas to find the valid ones, let alone the relevant ones?

A number of news outlets picked up the press release sent by Wiley, Yellow peril:  Are banana farms contaminating Costa Rica's crocs? The question mark in the title must be rhetorical. The press release leaves little doubt that readers are expected to agree with the conclusion of a study calling for banana plantations in Costa Rica to be better regulated because caimans from the Tortuguero area on the Atlantic coast “had been exposed to pesticides from upstream banana plantations”.  Sure enough, all the news pieces I saw reported the story uncritically. The Guardian went as far as saying that the study had “established that run-off from banana plantations is harming the caimans that glide stealthily through Costa Rica’s conserved waters.“

Mark Rowe, the son of Phil Rowe, recounts how his father convinced his mother to move to Honduras two months after the 1969 Football War between Honduras and El Salvador. He told her that they would only be there for two years. Little did he know at the time that the job of banana breeder he was about to accept with United Fruit (later known as Chiquita) would define the rest of his life, let alone that people would still be talking about him years after his death.

If you believe that history will repeat itself unless we learn from it, then you may be interested in a historical review of the introduction and spread of banana pests and pathogens on the African continent. It provides some revealing insights into how most of today’s most damaging pests and pathogens were unwittingly introduced into Africa with imported planting material. Against a backdrop of increasing travel movements, it urges renewed vigilance to prevent more pathogens from creeping in.

If a prize was awarded to the most popular opening line of scientific articles on bananas, it would have to go to “banana and plantain (Musa spp.) are the world’s fourth most important food crop after rice, wheat and maize”. I don’t mean it as a compliment though. In fact, I get slightly annoyed every time I see it. Firstly, it’s not clear how the claim can be verified given that it doesn’t say what was measured. Is it the number of tonnes produced? Production value in constant dollars? Consumption? Since the statement is usually not referenced, your guess is as good as mine.

On February 4th, the ProMusa community lost one of its long-standing members, Jacky Ganry.

Welcome to the ProMusa Crop Improvement Working Group. We look forward to working with you and of advancing the interests of the group as we all take it forward in the coming years.

The members of the three ProMusa working groups – Crop Improvement, Crop Protection and Crop Production – have elected a new chair and co-chair for the coming years. Robert Miller has been “promoted” from co-chair to chair of the Crop Improvement working group, with Edson Perito Amorim taking his place as co-chair. The Crop Protection working group welcomes Randy Ploetz and Danny Coyne, as chair and co-chair respectively. Jeff Daniells and Thierry Lescot will chair and co-chair the Crop Production working group over the coming years.

The recent news that the banana genome had been sequenced and published in Nature is said to have had “scientists breaking out the banana daiquiris.” My guess is that they more likely reached for their computer to download the sequence, but the point is the same. If ever a crop needed help from genomics research, it is the difficult-to-breed-and-to-study-using-classical-genetics banana. It also explains the early interest in sequencing its genome.

It didn’t take long after the journal Nature put online the article on the banana genome sequence for bloggers to start commenting on the Venn diagram featuring a a bright yellow banana. David Ng at Popperfont qualified it as, “quite possibly the most complicated (and therefore awesome) Venn Diagram ever”. Jonathan Eisen, the scientist who coined the term phylogenomics, said that it was “perhaps the best genomics Venn diagram ever”, while Joe, of the It’s okay to be smart blog wrote that it is “a pretty genius way of delivering a bunch of banana data all at once”. He added that it was the first time he ever saw a six-way Venn diagram. Joe is right to be impressed, but the truth is that this is not the first ever six-way Venn diagram.

Banana breeders are familiar with the routine of climbing a ladder in the early morning to collect male flowers and carrying them, and the ladder, over to the intended female plants to hand-pollinate female flowers. Since flowers open sequentially each day, each floral bunch is pollinated daily for a week. You could say that banana breeders serve as surrogates to natural pollinators, in this case bats.

There are some notable exceptions, but most scientists only exploit one way to share their research results: they publish a paper in a scientific journal. And these papers often tend to be … well, let’s admit it … quite dry, as Adam Ruben recently described it in his blog post about “How to write like a scientist”. Aside from the occasional presentation at a scientific conference (which, unless the scientist is an especially good speaker or presents ground-breaking results, are usually readily forgotten), most of us don’t take advantage of the wide range of other media that are available these days, such as videos, status updates, blog posts, blog comments, interactive graphs and maps, tweets, etc.

I never met Norman Simmonds, on whom I recently did a page in Musapedia. He died six months before I joined INIBAP in July 2002. Prior to doing a page on him I was glad he had shared so much of his vast knowledge of bananas (I keep my copies of Bananas and The Evolution of the Bananas at arm’s length since they are the first things I check whenever I am looking for information on bananas, even though new data have since poked holes in some of his hypotheses, like his account of domestication). But having read what people said about him after his death, at 79, I now regret having narrowly missed the opportunity to pick his brains (he apparently remained active right until his last weeks). I can only imagine how intimidating it would have been. He is said to have refused an entry in Who’s Who because their letter to him was sloppily written.

Some 200 people took part in the second global conference of the World Banana Forum in Guayaquil, business capital of Ecuador, at the end of February. International fruit companies, national producers, small farmers' organisations, trade unions of plantation workers, retailers, government representatives, scientists, certification bodies and NGOs met around an agenda for change in the industry that had been set 2 years earlier in Rome at the launch of the Forum.