S02 - Session O3 - Problems and prospects of establishing field genebank for CWR’s in Musa –a long experience

Authors: Subbaraya Uma Binit *, Saraswathi Marimuthu Somasundaram, Backiyarani Suthanthiram, Durai Palani, Kalpana Sathiamoorthy, Saranya Swaminathan

Exploiting resistant sources of Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) is one of the approaches to resistance breeding in crop plants. The major constraint in involving CWR in banana breeding is the lack of phenotypic and genotypic data and often accurate passport data. These are dependent on their access to systematic collections, conservation and characterization. Pre-breeding is the bridge to introgress valuable traits from CWR into cultivated varieties for which the characterisation for the desirable traits is warranted. But most of the Musa species are not characterized to date for two reasons, i.e. in-situ characterization is not possible, and ex-situ characterization needs their establishment in genebanks. But the establishment of CWR in a field gene bank is highly challenging due to the poor germination/ survival of seeds/suckers collected from their natural habitats. The latter needs information on sucker behaviour in transit and establishment success, fruit and seed details on maturity, germination, establishment and regeneration. The ICAR - National Research Centre for Banana in India, with 25 years of learning, has successfully established the first Musa QR coded CWR genebank in the field with 51 wild Musa species and types utilized for characterization, screening and distant hybridizations. The problems and prospects of establishing a field gene bank for the CWR of Musa is discussed in this paper.