shannondicorse

Surf,

Just to make it clear... I have never tried to pollinate any of the sausage shaped "Pacific Plantain" group . I might try one day with Hua Moa... just to say I've tried... but frankly, if I did; I'd rather do the reverse -try to use whatever very sparse Hua Moa pollen I can get to pollinate a balbisiana or an acuminata diploid; as these wild species are extremely female-fertile.

Everything I've read,though, says it can't be done - because these Pacific varieties are rather male and female sterile. Who knows?

This is, BTW, the really tedious part of extracting useful genetic material from triploid bananas, in the breeding of new cultivars from those ancient sterile hybrid cultivars we have inherited from the past.

My breeding experience is more with old AAA, AAB & ABB cultivars of Asia - and lately with "synthetic" triploids. I'm trying to use their "good" genes to domesticate wild species. Some of them, in the literature and in my experience, do produce a paltry few seeds with viable embryos on pollination.

Speaking now as a horticulturalist and gardener (...which is one of my first loves), if I wanted to propagate a specific banana cultivar commercially; I'd have to propagate a clonal line. Because, I'd want true-to-type plants.

For this, micropropagation methods - tissue culture etc., are currently en vogue. For my part I prefer cheap, simple macropropagation techniques from corms.

Now, AeAe is a chimera. This means that its meristem - its stem cell niches, if you wish - are not of ONE lineage like most bananas but of at least TWO types. Furthermore the types are spatially arranged in the meristem so that variegation occurs; and that variegation can be propagated indefinitely (...albeit there are significant reversions to all-green; and conversely, conversion to complete albinism).

So if you wish to propagate AeAe for fun or profit (or, why not BOTH!)... tissue culture is not really feasible, because you'll disrupt the topology of the chimeric meristem and it's not likely to be suitably reconstituted from the cultured calli - the name given to those amorphous aggregations of cells in tissue culture that might eventually give rise to somatic embryos.

You have to use macropropagation with AeAe.

In its simplest form, this means harvesting pups. But you can get many plantlets from a suitably treated corm, specially wounded, disinfected and placed in a suitable medium: sawdust mixtures; rice straw etc.

So If a horticulturalist wants to profitably grow AeAe - which are admittedly rather cute fellers - I'd recommend that s/he use this latter macropropagation method.

To the best of my knowledge, the "AeAe seed" offered by some folks on the internet might be scams.


sincerely,


shannon


shannon.di.corse@gmail.com