PR-Giants

I.C. 2 or Golden Beauty banana (bred at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad in 1928 by crossing the 'Gros Michel' with a wild Musa acuminate) is resistant to Panama disease and very resistant to Sigatoka. Though the bunches are small and the fruits short, they ship and ripen well and this cultivar is grown for export in Honduras and has been planted in Hawaii, Samoa and Fiji.



Is the IC2 and 1C2 the same?

TARS 17138 - Musa acuminata - 1-C-2 - Puerto Rico

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shannondicorse

PR,

I am recollecting ICTA material scattered all over Trinidad, so yes.

IC2 is a tetraploid (AAAA)...


THE 1C2 listed on your link is NOT likely to be IC2 as IC2 is not a dwarf and your banana accession 1C2/TARS17138 is written up as a triploid AAA.


The ARS illustration of the plant doesn't look like any of the synthetic AAAAs that I'm growing.


shannon


shannon.di.corse@gmail.com

raygrogan

Shannon - how do you like the IC2 banana, flavor-wise, etc.? Do you know if it is also resistant to BBTV? Ray

shannondicorse

Ray,

The "problem" with banana flavour in metropolitan markets is: "you can have any variety you want - as long as it's a Cavendish variety."

So the Gros Michel types are distinctly different in flavour from the Cavendish. And to unadventurous folks who have only known Cavendish; I can see real problems with Gros Michel reintroductions. Your'e talking more than 40 years of Cavendish now.

All the Mlali allies seem to have flavourful peels; but the pulp flavour varies a lot.

I find IC2 is nice enough; though I'm no connoisseur. I mean, I even eat all ripe plantains with absolute relish! IC2 isn't Cavendish, I can tell you!

As to BBTV - and via the literature - there does not seem to be resistance. I would imagine that this whole group is especially susceptible. I have no field experience with BBTV however, because it's not (yet!!) in the neotropics.


shannon

shannon.di.corse@gmail.com

raygrogan

Thanks for the info. Yes, indeed, "Cavendish only need apply" ... but I am thinking about a specific situation, Honolulu, where another variety is favored. We call them "apple", but the rest of the banana world calls them Brazilian. In general they sell for more than Cavendish, but are not very profitable because the yield is much less.

Following your good advice to have multiple cultivars gets tricky because of the disease BBTV. Count your lucky stars and hope it stays away from Trinidad. In Honolulu it pretty much wiped out all of the Cavendish type plants. The apple bananas are not resistant per se, but they get it far far less than the Cavendish. Out of about 10 matts you'll see maybe 1 infection per year if you watch carefully. If you kill that one pronto, all good til the next carrier aphid blows in.

So I'm always looking for another kind of banana to grow. Everyone loves the apple, but something different would be OK. If IC 2 is different from both Cavendish and apple that is almost a plus, as long as you like it as much as most other good bananas.

I was going to grow a plantain or saba ... but I think it was Gabe here that told me that they tend to "hide" BBTV - don't show symptoms very quickly. I get the impression that BBTV affects different bananas very differently. Anyway, just looking for a reasonably tasty banana that will do well with BBTV.

PR-Giants

Thanks Shannon, this is great info.

We're lucky to have a member in T&T.

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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shannondicorse

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.
============================

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?
=========================

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

PR-Giants

Start a 'How To' thread, I'll follow it and I have thousands of feral bananas looking for a purpose.

Thanks

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shannondicorse

What! You have seeded wild Musa vars up there in Puerto Rico?

shannon

shannon.di.corse@gmail.com

PR-Giants

Here's a few of those pdf files

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/51/458.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/31/297.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/57/269.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/51/32.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/49/69.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/25/125.pdf

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/49/57.pdf

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shannondicorse

My Diety!

No doubt PR, because of your large collection (...green with envy!). My advice: germinate everything you get.

I'm trying to breed diploid pathenocarpic balbisiana; and lately, because of prompting from some local Government agronomists, decent Cavendish/Gros Michel derived types.

I'd like to breed the Apple or Silk types; but 1st I'd have to get around the male infertility by pollinating Silk with diploid balbisiana. Hopefully, the B genome content would harbour some kind of partial resistance to the BBTV that Ray Grogan speaks about in his B genome containing bananas.

This is a lot of work. I have the field of Silk up. But no personnel to do the pollinations and then to sieve the ripe bunches (the fingers of the oldest hand of a banana bunch have to tree ripen for best natural sowing results).

I've begun to pollinate Orinoco females with balbisiana pollen - and I'm hoping for seed in the next two months. Saba & Pelipita are next. The ABB cultivars are thought to be more seed fertile than the AAAs and AABs.

Ray, I see you're in contact with Gabe. By now he must be postdoc. I wish I had his collection!


shannon

shannon.di.corse@gmail.com