Science and sensibility

As I said in my opening post I am going to use a few post a few of my older articles since Critic has taken down any online archive of them. So in that vein here's an article I wrote in about March of last year regarding the plight of the bannana palm:

It was reported last month the banana as we know it may be on the verge of extinction. A new parasite has emerged that the banana can’t fight off and worse still the bananas we buy from the supermarket are infertile hybrids whose chastity has left them with no way to evolve out of their bind. So how on earth do we get bananas in the first place if they are all infertile and what hope is there for the ongoing survival of the worlds most Freudian fruit?

In the wild the plant that bears us bananas is about a foot high herb that bears little yellow fruit similar to plantain filled to the gunnels with little black seeds. The impressive “banana palm” and the fruit we know and love is the result of a condition called triploidy. You me and just about every animal and plant on the face of the earth have 2 complete sets of chromosomes in each of our body cells. When the process of meiosis begins and we make gametes (sperms or eggs depending on you proclivity) those 2 sets are split leaving each new gamete with 1 set. When those gametes are mixed (to use the biologist’s euphemism) a new cell is created with the normal two sets.

In the case of triploidy a gamete gets created with 2 sets of chromosomes, when this gamete meets another “normal” one the offspring have not the usual two sets but three. This has a number of effects; for one it is now almost completely incapable of reproducing sexually or even forming seeds (as a matter of fact seedless watermelons and grapes are triploid strains) secondly some species grow much bigger given the right conditions. Bananas are believed to have been cultivated for about 8 000 years, the original farmers having taken a rare mutant from an Asian rainforest and reproduced that mutant by growing cuttings from the base of the plant.

So if the banana can’t evolve to evade its parasites then what chance does it have? A group with the unlikely name the “International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain” has a plan. They have acquired funding to sequence the genome of Musa acuminate the wild version of the banana. It is hoped this project will uncover genes that protect these sexually reproducing banana plants from their parasites. Finding those genes may only be the start of the trouble though; with cultivated bananas not reproducing sexually the only conceivable way of getting the genes into the plants would be genetic modification. ©Critical Publications Limited, 2003