Aseptic culture techniques for banana and plantain improvement

There is an urgent need to identify or to produce ‘Black Sigatoka’ diseasetolerant or -resistant cooking and dessert bananas. Since bananas are perhaps the most conspicuously sterile of all cultivated fruits, breeding of resistant stock is fraught with great difficulties. An overview is provided of the potential value that may be derived from the use of aseptic culture techniques for generating and/or multiplying specific pathogen-tolerant clones. Special emphasis is given to the principles underlying various strategies and to the several levels of sophisticated methods presently available or that still need to be further developed before substantive practical benefits accrue. While the stance adopted in this paper is conservative, so-called tissue culture approaches to banana breeding and improvement may well serve as a model not only forMusa but for other recalcitrant crop plants.