Though one’s gotta say, kitteh don’t look too happeh.
Posts Tagged: Banana
12
Apr 08
Bill Gates funds Banana Research
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 levels of vitamin A and iron in those fruits.
Those are worthy goals, but I find it interesting that building disease resistance – the most important thing that needs to happen in the area surrounding Lake Victoria, where fungal wilts are rapidly destroying banana crops – seems to be a secondary goal, at least according to the article linked above. The project is being run by James Dale, a well-known banana biotech researcher who is quoted in my book.
Meanwhile, in Africa, some Gates foundation work is seen as controversial, precisely because it is technology-oriented. My feeling is that bananas – because they are quite difficult to breed, and because it is very late in the game in terms of improving their strength in the field – require as much technology as they can get. In this case, perhaps, this may be a version of Windows that is able to prevent viruses (sorry.)
9
Mar 08
Reducing the carbon impact of supermarket bananas
Don’t blame the cute l’il ethylene molecule.
The “miracle” – if you want to call it that – of the banana industry is that it manages to transport a fragile fruit thousands of miles and still get it to your supermarket green, ready to fully ripen (“flecked with brown,” as the Chiquita jingle says) in exactly seven days. For over a century, this has been accomplished by controlling the atmosphere that surrounds the bananas in transport.
When fruit ripens, it gives off ethylene gas. Ethylene is a naturally-occurring substance, emitted as fruits ripen, and providing a sort of on-off switch to let other fruits nearby “know” when to ripen. (That’s why bananas ripen so evenly across a bunch.) It is also the “world’s most commonly produced organic compound,” according to a Science Daily report. Fruit distributors keep “ripening rooms,” where levels of ethylene can be controlled to hasten or delay ripening.
The report also notes that the current way industrial ethylene is generated for those ripening rooms (as well as dozens of other uses, including as a mecical anesthetic) releases a “miasma of greenhouse gasses.” (Sigh.) But scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab have recently come up with a new way to produce the gas via creating a high-temperature membrane that blocks the release of greenhouse gasses, allowing only harmless hydrogen to get through.
29
Feb 08
Doomsday Vaults and Black Box bananas
The “Fort Knox of Food.” From the International Herald Tribune.
The recent publicity about the opening of the “Global Seed Vault” in Longyearbyen, Norway, has prompted some questions about whether or not bananas are included. The vault is 500 meters deep, buried under a snow-capped mountain, and is filled with over a hundred million (!!!) different kinds seeds, all as a hedge against the predicted destruction to plant life global warming may be about to wreak. The project was described as a “backup hard drive” for agriculture by the New York Times (story). But bananas aren’t included. Why?
Simple: bananas don’t have seeds. And banana plantlets – the primary means of storing genetic material for the fruit – are an impossible fit for the Norwegian project, which can only store the so-called “orthodox” seeds – the kind that can be preserved dry. Storing bananas, as a recent press release from Bioversity International noted, need “human intervention. That’s always been the story with bananas. We brought them from the forest thousands of years ago, and we’ve carried them around the world. They aren’t just a product of human enterprise – they’re a companion to humanity.
Liquid nitrogen keeps the banana materials at minus 320 degrees fahrenheit (-196 degrees c.)
So, is there a banana bank account out there, working as a hedge against disaster? Yes – it is called the “Black Box” collection, stored at the French Research Institute for Development, in Montpellier, France. The tissue samples there duplicate of those stored at the International Transit Center at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium; that institution is one of the leading center for banana genetic research. “It’s a mirror of the need for crop diversity itself,” Emile Frison, Bioversity’s Director General, said. “Just as humanity needs different varieties of crops, so different crops need different kinds of long-term storage.”
That’s good news for bananas, which face many present-day external attackers – diseases and pests especially virulent to the fruit, which suffers from declining genetic diversity – that are as destructive as the doomsday scenarios contemplated by the ice mountain project.
(This story is based on a press release from Bioversity. Read it in its entirety here – it includes the story of how the Black Box works, and why bananas require unique storage techniques.)
