Save the Banana!
Microbial booster could protect bananas from deadly fungus
A fungal wilt disease is threatening banana plantations around the world, and managers have tried everything from fungicides to genetic modification to stop it. Now, researchers report in Biological Control that restoring the banana’s natural microbes might do the trick.
Plants host communities of bacteria and fungi called endophytes, which are thought to provide some resistance to pathogens. But bananas may lose their endophytes as they go through the industrial process of culturing and sterilization, rendering them more vulnerable to disease, the authors suggest.
The team inoculated cultured banana plantlets with endophyte extracts from healthy bananas, then infected the plantlets with the wilt pathogen. Endophyte treatments reduced early signs of infection by 54 percent, they found, and suppressed wilt disease by 67 percent at the five-month mark. Inoculated plants also grew faster than non-inoculated plants, even when the inoculated plants were infected and the control plants were not.
Endophyte treatments could be less harmful than fungicides and cheaper than genetic modification, the authors suggest. Restoring these microbial defenses might offer an alternative strategy for controlling “a formidable pathogen of banana plant,” they write. – Roberta Kwok
Source: Lian, J. et al. 2009. Artificial inoculation of banana tissue culture plantlets with indigenous endophytes originally derived from native banana plants. Biological Control DOI: 10.1016/j.biocontrol.2009.08.002
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