Dan Koeppel's Blog

Huggable, lovable – but not the kind of baby banana that I’m talking about.
Though the vast majority of bananas we buy – statistically, all – are of the endangered Cavendish variety, there’s a good chance you’ve seen something else, these days and if you’re a banana-type (or have become one), you might have wondered: what [...]

Image copyright Wiley-VCH 2008
Only Under UV light – from a degradation in chlorophyll, according to a study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Cool picture; read more at physorg.com.

Panama Disease-ravaged plantation in Asia (from Plant Health Progress.)
In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre – for the first time – publicly acknowledged the existence of Panama Disease (the incurable malady that wiped out the world’s banana crop in the first half of the 20th century, and that has devastated much [...]

Australian banana researcher James Dale. Image: QUT
Cavendish is our supermarket banana – the one that’s under threat from the newly-remerged Panama Disease (see here for more info.) The Cavendish banana is absolutely seedless and sterile, so it cannot be bred conventionally; the only sway to ensure its future as a commercial fruit would be through [...]

I’m sorry for this picture.
Click the link, to the Daijiworld newspaper, to find out the results of the study, if you dare…

Bangalore, May 29: Nagasandra, a village 50 km from Bangalore in Doddaballapur taluk, isn’t any different from the hundreds of others surrounding it. But in a remote corner of this small village is a [...]

The most controversial part of my book is my assertion that biotech is key to saving the banana. I came by this assertion with a lot of difficulty – initially believing that most genetic engineering in our food supply was a bad thing. But, as usual, the issue isn’t black and white. With bananas, the [...]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has begun one of the largest privately-funded banana genetics research projects; the greenhouse breeding program is concentrating on subsistence bananas – the kind millions of people in the African highlands depend on as their primary source of nutrition – and using DNA engineering and traditional breeding techniques to increase [...]