Banana breeding — A brief review

Banana is one of the most important fruit crops because of its year round availability, affordability, range of varieties, taste, and nutritive- and medicinal values. India is the leading producer of bananas worldwide accounting for 29% of the total production. The sustainable banana production is threatened by an ever increasing range of pests and diseases and adverse environmental conditions like drought and salinity. Thus, planting the improved cultivars with resistance to many biotic and abiotic stresses result in a cost effective production, by reducing the use of pesticides and other culture management expenses. One of the strategies to solve these problems is planting the superior varieties, which are resistant to major diseases, nematodes and pests. Thus, developing banana varieties/hybrids suitable for sustainable production under changing climatic conditions is the need of the hour. Most of the improved varieties are developed through clonal selection either from natural variant or from somaclonal variant of tissue culture plants or through variation created through mutation. In spite of the inherent problem of female sterility and poor germination of seeds many banana hybrids are also being developed and utilized by the farmers and improved hybrids are also being used as one of the parents in hybridization programme. Being a vegetativley propagated crop, possibility of combining sexual and asexual reproduction systems is the key strategy to develop new cultivars in banana. This paper documented the improvement of banana through various strategies namely clonal selection, somaclonal variants, mutation breeding and various hybridization programmes like diploid, triploid and tetraploid breeding. Development of disease resistant molecular markers to the pace the efficiency of plantain and banana improvement through molecular marker-assisted breeding approaches is also briefed.