Quote:
Originally Posted by Baboon
I think I've got it.First thing I need to do is get velutina,which is obviosly quite a task here...uhh...But what i meant to do is apply a colchicine chemical on a growing pup.That should result in me having a polyploid velutina...then I would need to wait until it flowers,and in the same time have another flowering velutina with norlmal 2n chromozomes.Then I cross-polinate those two plants to get the seeds from witch an seedless musa velutina(that's 3n if I'm not wrong) would grow.Can someone give some more insight on this?
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This and similar ideas have been discussed at length elsewhere on this site, but I cannot bother to find those discussions right now (you can search for them though), so I will give you some basic answers here.
Applying colchicine to a growing pup will almost certainly not result in a tetraploid. The colchicine must be applied thoroughly to the meristem, which in bananas is hidden inside at the base of the pseudostem. Therefore, to create tetraploid bananas the procedure must be done in vitro with small explants. Also it must be replicated many times and the resulting plants checked for ploidy (normally done by flow cytometry) as it is quite easy to only partially convert the tissue and end up with mixoploids.
After that however, crossing a 4n and a 2n of the same wild plant may end up with a triploid plant, but will not produce edible fruit. You would just have a potentially sterile plant that would not develop it's fruit at all. This is because in bananas seedless/edible fruit is the result of vegetative parthenocarpy and is quite unrelated at all to ploidy. The parthenocarpy is controlled by 3 genes which must come from an edible banana. So, the wild plants with the desired traits must be crossed with edible bananas.
If you were performing this breeding research in the tropics with all of the necessary resources, it is my estimation that it would take at least 7-10 years to come up with something close to what you are looking for.