SoCal2warm

Is there anyone here with a lot of land in climate zone 9 or 10 who would be interested in trying to carry out banana hybridization?
I mean to try to breed a more cold hardy new banana variety?

I could be able to send you some rare banana species pups, then you would grow them up to flowering stage, cross pollinate between different plants, carefully document everything, and then collect the seeds from the fruits and mail them back.

You probably need to have a decent amount of land to be able to grow several additional seeded banana plants.


This is how the hybridization strategy would basically work. Pollen from a seedless banana would be used to pollenate a species banana that has seed.
Due to the science behind this, I believe that in many cases the resulting hybrid plants that would grow from those seeds would be tetraploids (with twice the chromosome sets as a regular seeded banana). Crossing that once more with a regular seeded species banana should result in a triploid banana without seeds, in the third generation.

The reason the second generation would be tetraploid is that regular seedless bananas are triploid. When a fruiting plant has an uneven number of chromosome sets, they have trouble properly dividing during sexual meiosis. That reduces pollen fertility, but there are a smaller fraction of sexual cells that never underwent chromosome division, so contain the complete set of chromosomes from the parent. So you have a sexual cell from the pollen carrying 3 sets of chromosomes which combines with the sexual cell from the female plant that only contains 1 chromosome set.
So the majority of viable seeds that are able to form would have 4 sets of chromosomes, rather than the normal 2.

Banana breeding is not easy and it would probably take several years, so this would be a long term commitment, and I would need your contact information and to stay in touch with you for a couple years.

Right now I have no problem germinating seeds and quickly growing them to 1 foot tall pups indoors, but after that I don't have anywhere to grow larger plants.

sirdoofus

That sounds pretty cool, too bad I am across a border and a couple of climate zones too low, 'cause I've got the space and would love to help.

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