Abstract
Fusarium wilt of bananas (Musa spp.), caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc) causes up to 100% yield loss in bananas. Foc race 1 in particular is very devastating to dessert bananas in Uganda. One of the effective control strategies for the disease is the development of resistant cultivars through breeding. The objectives of this study were to identify suitable banana germplasm for generating a segregating population for resistance to Foc race 1 and understand the mode of inheritance of resistance to Foc race 1. Twenty-two banana accessions sourced from the National Agricultural Research Organisation in Uganda were challenged with Foc race 1 in a screen house experiment. Monyet, resistant to Foc race 1 and Kokopo, susceptible, were selected and crossed to generate 142 F1 genotypes. These F1 genotypes were also challenged with Foc race 1 in a screen house experiment. Data were collected on rhizome discoloration index (RDI), leaf symptom index (LSI) and pseudo-stem splitting (PSS), and analysed for variability. The banana accessions evaluated showed varying degrees of resistance to Foc race 1. Segregation ratios for resistant versus susceptible progenies fitted 13:3 (χ2 = 0.12, P = 0.73) for RDI and 11:5 (χ2 = 3.04, P = 0.08) for PSS. Estimated broad sense heritability was 27.8% for RDI, 13.9% for LSI and 14.7% for PSS. The results suggest that resistance to Foc race 1 in banana is controlled by at least two dominant genes with epistatic interaction and that heritability of resistance to Foc race 1 is low in Musa spp.
Highlights
Banana (Musa spp.) a heterogeneous, outcrossing and vegetatively propagated crop (Ortiz and Swennen 2014), is cultivated in more than 130 countries in the world (FAOSTAT 2016)
Genotype mean squares determined by analysis of variance (ANOVA) were highly significant (P \ 0.001) for rhizome discoloration index (RDI) and leaf symptom index (LSI) as the
Genotypes Hutishamba, Mraru, Mshale, Njuru, Nshonowa, Kahuti, Mlelembo which belong to the AA-Mchare group, and Kokopo, which originates from Papua New Guinea, were significantly different from the resistant control (Mbwazirume) according to the standard error mean separations and least significance differences (LSD) between means of the genotypes for RDI (Fig. 1)
Summary
Banana (Musa spp.) a heterogeneous, outcrossing and vegetatively propagated crop (Ortiz and Swennen 2014), is cultivated in more than 130 countries in the world (FAOSTAT 2016). Industrialised nations view banana essentially as a dessert item, many regions of the developing world consider bananas as an essential staple that contributes significantly to the caloric intake of low-income subsistence farmers (Etebu and Young-Harry 2011; Brown et al 2017). It is a food and cash crop for more than 70 million smallholder farmers in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, with an annual production worth US$ 4.3 billion, which is about 5% of the region’s gross domestic product (EAC 2012). Dessert bananas are widely eaten when ripe and used in local beer breweries (Van Asten et al 2010; Karangwa et al 2016)
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