Posted on 06/20/2025 6:17:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
A new genome mapping model uncovered 62 key trait loci in bananas, overcoming chromosomal barriers and aiding future crop improvement across complex plant genomes.
Bananas are a dietary staple for millions of people, but their cultivation faces serious threats due to limited genetic diversity and significant breeding challenges. In a major scientific breakthrough, researchers examined more than 2,700 triploid banana hybrids to uncover the genetic basis of 24 important traits related to yield, plant structure, and fruit quality. By using a high-resolution SNP dataset along with an adapted genome-wide association study (GWAS) model, the team identified 62 genomic regions associated with these traits, known as quantitative trait loci (QTLs).
Many of these QTLs would have gone undetected using conventional methods because of the large chromosomal rearrangements found in banana genomes. These findings provide a valuable genetic roadmap for improving banana varieties and offer new strategies for breeding crops with complex genomes.
Breeding bananas is notoriously difficult. Most commercial bananas are sterile triploids, which means they reproduce without seeds and have limited genetic recombination, along with long and slow growth cycles. Further complicating breeding efforts, many banana varieties contain large chromosomal rearrangements that interfere with inheritance patterns and make it difficult to identify trait-linked genes.
Although there are thousands of banana cultivars globally, production is dominated by just a few, such as the widely grown ‘Cavendish’, making the entire crop susceptible to pests and environmental changes.
While GWAS has revolutionized genetic research in many crops, it has been less effective in bananas due to these genomic barriers. As global food systems face mounting challenges, understanding and addressing the complex genetics of bananas has become more urgent. To tackle this, researchers focused on developing more effective models for identifying useful genetic traits.
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
I love bananas. They do grow in California - but if we have a freeze, it can kill the entire plant. Some of my neighbors in So Cal have had great success growing bananas.
“Selective breeding is the opposite of natural hybridization.”
No it is not. It is exactly the same thing. Hybridization is how you selectively breed. It is just physical manipulation of something that nature will allow. Nature allows manipulation of pollen swapping and selecting the best of seeds and pollen from the best of plants. Nature will allow grafting of similar species from one to the other. Or interbreeding animals of a different shape, color, or size.
Putting fish DNA in a plant is not going to be allowed naturally anymore than crossing a cat with a dog. Or a duck with a fish. GMO can force those unnatural combinations. If nature will not allow it then it is unnatural.
NATURAL hybridization (which are the words YOU USED) is what happens NATURALLY when plants and animals adapt for local conditions. Selective breeding is what happens when PEOPLE look at these naturally hybridized plants and say “this one here produces more fruit, but it doesn’t taste good; that one over there makes very little fruit, but it tastes great; what happens if we find a way to get them to breed”. And sometimes it works and you get more better fruit. But also often you wind up with something like corn that can no longer propagate itself and would cease to exist without us. NATURAL hybridization will never result in a plant or animal that can’t propagate itself.
Putting fish DNA in a plant is just the new high tech way to wind up with a plant that does what we want it to rather than what nature wants it to. But at it’s core it’s no different than making corn.
Gene Mapping is not GMO, although it will probably be used for that purpose because it’s faster than crossbreeding.
Open your mind.
I suppose you also think that permanently genetically manipulating and changing human DNA with vaccines is cool too right?
Look at how you run away from the facts and go to personal attack. So now that we both realize you’re wrong and genetic manipulation of plants and animals have been done by humans for thousands of years, we’re done. Have a great day.
Answer the question...
I will not respect your red herring.
Answer the reality: do you recognize that corn is the result of genetic manipulation and could not possibly occur in nature?
I want a banana that stays fresh and does not turn brown the next day... 🍌
I was in Taiwan on a project working in the jungle with some local workers. (The resident engineers wouldn’t go off the road!).
We took a break and one of the workers came back with a huge bunch of bananas. Very small (maybe 4 to 5 inches long) and brown to black in color. They looked rotten, but they were all eating them so I gave it a try.
It was unbelievable how tasty it was. Had a very strong banana taste - like banana taffy candy or whatever it was I used to have as a kid. I don’t recall the texture, but the taste was exceptional. Our store-bought bananas have no taste as far as I can tell in comparison.
I must be talking with a female. Look... You attacked me first and started this. So don’t try to spin this around back on me with the red herring argument. You know exactly the point I am making about the difference between lab manipulated DNA strings and selection of the fittest/hybridization over thousands of years through nature accepted means. >No they are NOT the same at all, not even close and you know this.<
So stop trying to yank my chain and just please answer the question. If unnatural inorganic DNA modified foods are OK then unnatural DNA modified humans are fine too right? Just yes or no... Because what I suspect is hypocrisy. I am trying to figure out why you would even go out of your way to defend GMO foods like this? Invested in GMO stock? Just don’t like me so you jumped on a reason to scrap with me?
Oh look here you go again. Not only with personal attacks, but LIES also. I never attacked you, at all. Your “question” about vaccines IS a red herring. I do know the point you are failing to make because it’s not real. What I’m pointing out to you is that the day human switched from hunter gatherers to farmers and started deciding which crops we like more we put ourself on a path of manipulating the genes of EVERYTHING we grow. They are ABSOLUTELY the same. I’m sorry you refuse to see that, but it’s a you problem.
Whether its corn, or mules, or turkeys. We change the genes, often making things that breed themselves (modern farm turkey can’t get their... bits... together and must be artificially inseminated).
I will NOT answer your red herring question. It is besides the point. You started all this with a question “Is there anything left that is NOT GMO?” and I gave you the answer:
no, never.
Every crop, every food animal, ever our work animals for ALL of recorded human history has had their genes manipulated by US. That is a fact on the table. You can pretend that’s not true but that’s you pretending.
I’m not scrapping with you. I answered your question. YOU decided to run to ad hominems, red herrings, and well poisoning. None of which changes the facts on the table. YOU chose to scrap. And you are scrapping only with yourself because I have no need to fight. And you are losing. Because choosing to scrap all you’ve done is show your mind is not open, you do not have the facts, and you do not have the logic.
Now really, we’re done. You insist on fighting with yourself. I choose not watch. Goodbye, good luck, and sincere, have a nice day.
And the aggressor cries victim...
Even still that is not an acceptable case for me... Never liked anyone who was fake and not real and lived a lie. All the plastic surgery in the world does not change who a person really is inside.
How very Islamic of you. Submission to God's Allah's will.
Oh, wait, you didn't say that? Well, perhaps not. But then again that sort of chickesh!t comment is how you roll, and it is far fairer than your chickesh!t comment accusing Freepers who don't oppose using non-dark ages techniques on plants, of supporting genetic manipulation of human beings.
So what is your skin in the game to support and defend GMO tech? Own Stock in the industry?
Can we still eat just fine without any GMO tech?
Of course... So only someone with ulterior motives and greedy reasons would support GMO tech. Just like Red Food dye it is not at all needed period. The only reasons for GMO are based on pure monetary greed.
My point, which you are too dull witted, or trollish, to grasp, is that you take a statement from a Freeper, then claim that the statement means something it clearly, very, very, clearly does not, along the lines of comparing apples and not oranges, but sewer treatment plants, then launch into a diatribe against the Freeper.
You trolled me first to go out of your way to defend an industry designed purely to make money from dangerous unnatural technology.
So you are the Troll and dishonest.
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