If you've never thought about the banana's history, it's more complicated than you think.
More than 7,000 years ago, communities began to grow wild Musa acuminata plants for their own purposes. The plant's fruit gradually evolved into the famous banana we all love.
Most of the bananas we eat are duplicate varieties. It wouldn't take much for a single plague to decimate the global supply if there were different genetic approaches to handling diseases.
There are signs that other banana plant relatives contributed to its development, with evidence of three previously un described species.
Learning more about them could lead to new ways to protect ourselves from diseases.
It is more difficult to understand the history of the delicious grass-like flowering plant due to the fact that different banana varieties have different number of copies of the same chromosomes.
Scientists were able to identify the genetic fingerprints of more than 200 different banana leaf extracts. The team was able to create a detailed family tree of the ancestors of the bananas we have today.
A genetic resources scientist from the Alliance of Bioversity International says that most of today's diploid cultivated bananas that descend from the wild banana M. acuminata are hybrid.
There are at least three mystery ancestors that must have contributed to this mixed genome thousands of years ago.
The researchers believe that two of these three mystery ancestors are the same as those which had previously been identified using a different genetic analysis approach, but now we have more information about these gaps in the banana tree family history
It means that there are some banana species that have never been recorded by scientists.
"Our personal conviction is that they are still living in the wild, either poorly described by science or not described at all, in which case they are likely to be threatened."
The team compared the locations of similar banana species around the world to figure out where the missing varieties might be.
The researchers say that it's important to find the missing ancestors so that we can preserve the diversity that they offer and improve the quality of bananas in the future.
"Breeders need to understand the genetic make-up of today's domesticated diploid bananas for their crosses between cultivars, and this study is a major first step toward the characterization in great detail of many of these cultivars," says the Alliance of scientists.
The research has appeared in a journal.
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