Are bananas being cloned?

Are apples clones?

Cloning is the production of an offspring that is the genetic twin of one of its parents. In the world of plants, where fruit and vegetable growers are, cloning is not terribly controversial. All apple varieties, all grapes, potatoes, strawberries and some other plants are produced by asexual propagation of clones.

Bananas are both a fruit and not a fruit. While the banana plant is colloquially called a banana tree, it’s actually an herb distantly related to ginger, since the plant has a succulent tree stem, instead of a wood one. The yellow thing you peel and eat is, in fact, a fruit because it contains the seeds of the plant.

According to Urban Dictionary, the black tip of the banana is called the “bananus,” otherwise known as “the little brown part at the bottom of a banana that no one in their right mind eats.”

The reason the bananas we eat don’t have seeds is that they are all sterile. A long time ago the Cavendish bananas first came into being when a tetraploid banana (that is a plant that has four copies of every chromosome instead of the normal two) mated with a normal diploid banana.

The story goes that the difference in flavors came about because the artificial flavor was developed from an old variety of bananas called the Gros Michel. However, the Gros Michel succumbed to a fungus and ceased to be commercially produced. It was replaced by the Cavendish, which had a slightly different flavor.

Some, in fact, are large and take up much of the fruit, making the flesh hard to eat. Our commercial bananas (which are, for the most part, the Cavendish variety) have been specially bred over the years so that they are seedless triploids (with three sets of genes, instead of just two) that do not form mature seeds.

While purely ornamental varieties of bananas often produce seeds (and virtually inedible fruit), a genuinely edible banana that produces viable seeds is a treasured rarity. But most edible bananas, if you stop to think about it long enough, don’t produce seeds.

Almost all modern edible parthenocarpic (seedless) bananas come from two wild species – Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. They are grown in 135 countries, primarily for their fruit, and to a lesser extent to make fiber, banana wine, and banana beer and as ornamental plants.

Wild bananas, prior to domestication, do have seeds. But like seedless grapes, humans have found and cultivated seedless mutations. So now all banana trees come from cuttings and there are no seeds in the fruit. The little brown specs in a banana are the vestiges of seeds that did not develop because of the mutation.

Panama disease is a plant disease of the roots of banana plants. It is a type of Fusarium wilt, caused by the fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. The pathogen is resistant to fungicide and cannot be controlled chemically.

The banana is a perennial plant that replaces itself. Bananas do not grow from a seed but from a bulb or rhizome, and it takes 9 to 12 months from sowing a banana bulb to harvesting the fruit. The banana flower appears in the sixth or seventh month. Growing bananas is, in general, labour intensive.

Some horticulturists believe that bananas were the first fruit on earth. Their origin is placed in Southeast Asia, in the jungles of Malaysis. Indonesia or the Philippines. where many varieties of wild bananas still grow today.

There are over 1,000 varieties of wild banana in the world. But 95% of banana exports come from a single cultivated variety, the Cavendish. They are basically clones, that is, genetically identical plants. This means they do not have seeds and are nicer to eat.

Bananas are high in potassium and contain good levels of protein and dietary fiber. Bananas are rich in a mineral called potassium. In turn, healthy kidneys make sure that the right amount of potassium is kept in the body. One medium-sized banana contains 422 milligrams of potassium.

The first several rows to be exposed are female flowers that develop into “hands” (or tiers) of bananas, typically with 12 to 20 bananas making up a hand. Because the fruit is produced from a single ovary on the flower, a banana is actually classified as a berry, botanically speaking. So, it’s an herb and a berry…

They are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them an aggregate fruit. True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds. Tomatoes fall into this group, as do pomegranates, kiwis and—believe it or not—bananas.

Strawberries are not really berries, but watermelon, pumpkins, bananas, and avocados are. It’s ok. Take a few deep breaths. While we’ve tended to define berries as any small edible fruit, the official definition of a berry is “a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary.”

The definition includes many fruits that are not commonly known as berries, such as grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, bananas, and chili peppers. Fruits excluded by the botanical definition include strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, which are aggregate fruits; and mulberries, which are multiple fruits.

Grapes are considered a true berry because the entire pericarp (fruit wall) is fleshy. A native California wild grape (Vitis girdiana) that grows in canyon bottoms and along streams in southern California.