Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants
Thanks Shannon, this is great info.
How many IC's were developed?
How many have you been able to locate?
Were these the first synthetic bananas?
Do you have access to any of the original documents?
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PR,
The ones that are consistently mentioned are IC-1 & IC-2. I can't recognise IC-1. I've never seen it. IC-2 is not at all plentiful here on Trinidad. The banana breeding programme was soon moved to Bodles, Jamaica; and the ICTA worked on understanding the cytogenetics of bananas.
I do believe that the people at ICTA were the first coordinated goal oriented banana breeders; though there might have been uncoordinated breeding in India prior to this. The ICTA folks were rather classy scientists.
I have IC2; 168-12; and 3405-1.
I do have a few of the ICTA banana docs. I downloaded them from the Indian Academy of Sciences - of all places.
Here, try this server specific
Google search string:
banana breeding site:
www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/ filetype(colon)pdf
(note: that's a real colon : before the pdf and you type the whole search string into the Google search... the parser on this bananas-org page renders the url as a link...ignore please)
I should really go to the St. Augustine, Trinidad Campus Library of the University of the West Indies - this campus was the heir to ICTA in 1960.
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Much of my banana cultivar material has been freely donated by farmers. Apparently, these good people realise the need for crop breeding.
The rest of the cultivar material is "recovered" from abandoned cacao estates; or just picked up at dumps and roadsides.
Feral material - almost all ICTA escapees; I collect from the wild.
I'm also doing cassava, cacao and - get this - I'm starting on breadfruit(!!!).
I have to be nuts, right?
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What perplexes me with banana breeders is how they typically insist on breeding back to near-sterile cultivar females.
Why? Am i missing something here?
Cavendish, for example, is rather reasonably male fertile; and can be used to pollinate suitable natural or synthetic seed fertile diploids.
This can in theory allow straight triploid production in one crossing; or diploid production for sib mating and segregant selection; followed by cycles of pollination of these diploid lines by Cavendish.
A farmer can then grow several "pseudo-Cavendish-es" together on one field and get a degree of horizontal resistance.
shannon
shannon.di.corse@gmail.com