AAP 27.02.97 02:45
Copyright 1997 The Australian Associated Press. Redistribution unauthorised.
by Gil Breitkreutz of AAP
BRISBANE, Feb 27 AAP - The ABC gave us Bananas in Pyjamas - now university scientists have produced the genetically engineered "super banana", designed to withstand the scourge of bunchy top virus.
"But the fruit will look the same, peel the same, smell the same and taste the same so the public should not be alarmed at the prospect of test-tube bananas," said Professor James Dale, head of Queensland University of Technology's School of Life Sciences.
"Years ago bunchy top almost wiped out bananas growing in Australia, slashing the number of plantations from 500 to four."
The Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association said the Australian banana industry was worth about $150 million a year, mostly through the domestic market.
Funded by the World Bank and fruit growing organisations, Prof Dale and his team have worked on the project for 10 years, painstakingly growing banana plants from single cells.
"We have healthy plants up to a metre high which have been cultivated from a mono cell which has been successfully injected with extra genes," he said.
The next stage was the injection of the virus resistant genes and the successful "transplants" were now growing in test tubes.
"The tiny plants are doing well in what is really a plant humidicrib," Prof Dale said.
"But they are very vulnerable to contamination from bacteria or fungi trapped on people's hands or clothes." Another danger was a badly-timed sneeze.
Prof Dale said the bunchy-top resistent plants would be grown and a slow selection process would elminate any with deficencies.
"We may only use one plant out of 200 to reproduce the final disease resistant banana," he said.
The research team was also producing plants resistant to banana brack mosaic virus, a constant threat to commercial growers in the Pacific region.
Prof Dale said genetically engineered banana plants would not be commercially available for about five years.
But when they were released to growers from Cairns to Coffs Harbour, the deadly bunchy top would become just a bad memory, he said.
And genetic engineering would also overcome problems with bananas popular overseas but unable to be grown successfully in Australia.
Prof Dale said bananas were the world's fourth largest rural product behind rice, wheat and milk.
"The whole issue of genetically engineered bananas is highly competitive," he said.
AAP geb/bt/de