|
Review of
tissue culture and genetic studies of East African highland bananas in
Uganda
P.R. Rubaihayo,
S. Kassim, S. Nanteza & A.K. Tugume
Banana is grown in Uganda by over 1.8 million farmers
on 1.5 million hectares of land, typically on small (0.5 ha) stands.
A decline and sometimes disappearance of banana cultivation,
attributed largely due to increasing pests and diseases of highland
bananas, has been witnessed
in the last three decades. In
order to address this situation it was necessary in the first instance
to provide farmers with suckers free from non-obscure pests and
pathogens that are transmittable in contaminated planting materials
through conventional methods of propagation. Available control measures
of these pests and diseases are often beyond the means of most farmers.
However, host resistance would check further losses due to these
constraints. Due to
difficulties associated with the conventional breeding of Musa, which includes lack of useful genetic variability and low
levels of female fertility, efforts have been made to develop tissue
and/or cell culture protocols to help expose the tissue and/or cells to
mutagenic agents and/or transformation systems so as to create
variability or transfer resistance genes to the East African Highland
bananas [EAHB]. PCR-based
fingerprinting technique (AFLP) has been used to establish the genetic
relationships among EAHB clones. In
vitro propagation protocol using shoot-tips has been established for
EAHB cultivars and studies of production and regeneration of somatic
embryos in EAHB initiated. The genetic relatedness of the EAHB has been
determined and found to be very close, indicating that these bananas
probably originated from a single clone or very closely related clones.
The work reported complements the classical breeding methods of
improvement going on in the country aimed at producing banana cultivar
resistant to the major pests and diseases.
|
