“Breeding Better Bananas” project excels in developing new ‘Matooke’ hybrids
In October 2019, the “Breeding Better Bananas” project transitioned into Phase II—“Accelerated Breeding Better Bananas”—to further streamline the conventional breeding of banana in East Africa. This project brings together an international spectrum of partners to transform the national banana breeding programs in Uganda and Tanzania.
This improved banana breeding pipeline has produced more than 231 Matooke hybrids for advanced screening in the field, a stunning 250% overachievement on the project target for its 5-year timeframe. Another significant achievement included developing the first-ever Mchare hybrids, which have been produced in Tanzania.
These project achievements and numerous other successes were highlighted at the first annual planning and review meeting of Phase II by Team leader Prof. Rony Swennen, Head of IITA’s Banana Breeding Program.
“We agreed to deliver 95 promising Matooke hybrids but ultimately were able to select 231 for advancement to Preliminary Yield Trials (PYT),” Swennen said.
This adds to the abundance of seeds produced (230,000) and embryos cultured (160,000), which far exceeded projections. For a crop viewed as among the most difficult to breed, this is rewarding progress.
Bananas naturally produce very few seeds, which form the foundation of any breeding effort. Stimulating bananas to produce seeds and successfully culturing or rescuing the embryos is therefore critical to developing successful and efficient breeding pipelines.
The project team has also developed crucial markers to enable breeders to identify the location of desired genes. Digital tools that provide efficient tracking of all steps in the breeding pipeline and facilitate data collection have all contributed to enabling much more efficient tracking and data management.
All this progress helps make banana breeding a viable and feasible undertaking, which can be developed by national programs. The difficulties faced in conventionally breeding banana have previously been problematic in developing banana breeding programs. This has now changed!
