Musa spp consists of the various banana and plantain varieties. They constitute an important food crop that grows in the tropics but is consumed throughout the world. They are ranked as the fourth most important food crop of the world, after rice, wheat and corn. It is the most consumed fruit. Less than 15% of bananas produced are exported to
More...the United States, Europe and Japan. The rest of the banana crop is consumed locally - India and Brazil produce the most bananas and export none. Banana is highly nutritious being rich in vitamins A, C, and B6. It also contains high levels of calcium, potassium, and phosphorus.Musa are monocotyledons - very distant relatives of rice. They are not trees; rather the banana plant is an enormous herb with a pseudostem that spouts whorls of leaves. They are one group of few plants that exhibit bi-parental cytoplasmic inheritance: paternal inheritance of mitochondria and maternal inheritance of plastids. Diploid bananas are one of two genome types: AA (M. acuminata) or BB (M. balbisiana). Also bananas exhibit different ploidy levels both as autopolyploids, allopolyploids, and as AB hybrids. Regardless of ploidy or genome type, bananas have a haploid complement of 11 chromosomes. The edible banana was developed through a combination of parthenocarpy and sterilty. Thus it is very difficult to introgress traits by standard breeding methods.The banana initially came from jungles in India, China and Southeast Asia. It was first cultivated in Southeast Asia approximately 10,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years these breeders had developed a large number of sterile hybrids which are still cultivated today. These are propagated by suckers grown from rhizomes. Arab traders introduced the banana to the east coast of Africa by the first millenium BC. Planting material was traded by the tribes of Africa and subjected to further breeding so that parts of Africa are considered as secondary centers of genetic diversity. Alexander the Great introduced the banana to the West in 327 BC. Gonzalo Fernadez de Oviedo y Valdes reported that Spanish explorers had carried bananas from the west coast of Africa to Latin America by 1516.The first export market banana, the Gros Michel, was introduced to United States markets by a fishing boat captain. The Gros Michel banana was susceptible to a soil fungus known as Panama disease. This pathogen was uncontrollable by any known fungicides. A 4 decade endeavor by United Fruit to breed fungus resistance into the Gros Michel was stopped without success in 2001. In the 1940's a pathogen-resistant banana was discovered in the private greenhouse of the Duke of Devonshire, in Chatsworth, England by Standard Fruit. This banana, the Cavendish, despite being inferior to the Gros Michel in all other commercial traits, is now the sole export banana to the United States and Europe.The Cavendish is susceptible to other diseases, such as black sigatoka, which are controlled by pesticides. Small-scale farmers are unable to afford the chemicals while the large-scale farmers heavily spray to control the pathogens. Growers in some tropical countries face much more potent threats; some of these such as Tropical Race 4, a new more virulent strain of Panama disease, are not controlled by pesticides.The Global Musa Genomics Consortium (GMGC) was established in 2001 to develop new banana varieties by comparative genomics study and by sequencing of the banana genome. GMGC is an international consortium of investigators from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is lead by Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI). The plan is to sequence the Southeast Asian banana Musa acuminata. Less...| Sequence data: | genome assemblies: 2; sequence reads: 2 | (See Genome Assembly and Annotation report) | | | Statistics: | median total length (Mb): 461.539 | | median protein count: 47707 | | median GC%: 37.8645 | | NCBI Annotation Release: | 101 |
Reference genome:  
Musa acuminata subsp. malaccensisSubmitter: Genoscope/IG/CEA |
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| Chr | 1 | NC_025202.1 | HE813975.1 | 27.57 | 40.1 | 3,819 | 66 | 2,671 | 62 | | | Chr | 2 | NC_025203.1 | HE813976.1 | 22.05 | 40.6 | 3,053 | 39 | 2,216 | 70 | | | Chr | 3 | NC_025204.1 | HE813977.1 | 30.47 | 40.6 | 4,445 | 56 | 3,092 | 61 | | | Chr | 4 | NC_025205.1 | HE813978.1 | 30.05 | 39.9 | 4,531 | 56 | 3,185 | 95 | | | Chr | 5 | NC_025206.1 | HE813979.1 | 29.38 | 40.0 | 3,846 | 55 | 2,861 | 85 | | | Chr | 6 | NC_025207.1 | HE813980.1 | 34.9 | 40.3 | 4,950 | 79 | 3,522 | 99 | | | Chr | 7 | NC_025208.1 | HE813981.1 | 28.62 | 40.6 | 3,728 | 52 | 2,681 | 72 | | | Chr | 8 | NC_025209.1 | HE813982.1 | 35.44 | 40.4 | 4,589 | 59 | 3,196 | 85 | | | Chr | 9 | NC_025210.1 | HE813983.1 | 34.15 | 40.4 | 4,014 | 56 | 2,874 | 76 | | | Chr | 10 | NC_025211.1 | HE813984.1 | 33.67 | 40.9 | 4,207 | 60 | 2,978 | 74 | | | Chr | 11 | NC_025212.1 | HE813985.1 | 25.51 | 40.1 | 3,463 | 62 | 2,506 | 67 | | | Un | - | . | - | 140.42 | 41.6 | 3,062 | 71 | 2,424 | 114 | |
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