Overview

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Musa acuminata, commonly known as banana, is an annual herb belonging to the Musa genus in the Musaceae family. Banana is one of the four major fruits in the world, with abundant yield, widespread distribution, nutritious flesh, and sweet, soft taste. Banana is also the fourth largest food crop, after rice, wheat and corn. While the original wild bananas contained large seeds, diploid or polyploid cultivars (some being hybrids) with tiny seeds or triploid hybrids without seeds are preferred for human raw fruit consumption.

Geographical Distribution

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Bananas originated in India and have a history of over 2000 years in China. They were introduced to Central America in the early 19th century. Central America is now one of the major banana-producing regions in the world, and Ecuador in South America is known as the "Banana Country".

In China, the main banana production areas are Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, and Taiwan. Excellent varieties include the "Dragon Tooth Banana" and "Fragrant Tooth Banana" in Guangdong and Fujian, as well as the "Northern Banana" in Taiwan.

Application

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• Edible use: Bananas are one of the world's four major fruits, known for their abundant production, wide distribution, nutritious flesh, and sweet, soft taste.
• Medicinal use: The medicinal properties of bananas in treating conditions such as fever, thirst, dry lung cough, constipation, and hemorrhoids are documented in the "Daily Use Materia Medica."
• Trade use: In addition to satisfying the domestic market in China, bananas hold a significant position in the international fruit import and export trade.
• Healthcare: Bananas are highly nutritious, rich in vitamins A, C, and B6, as well as calcium, potassium, and phosphorus.
• Ornamental use: With its dense clusters of plants, creeping stems, elongated leaves, and pendulous inflorescences, the banana tree also holds great ornamental value.
• Other industrial raw materials: Bananas can be used to produce fiber, banana wine, and banana beer.

Genome sequencing

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DH-Pahang is a diploid genotype (2n = 22) of M. acuminata belonging to the malaccensis subspecies. The funding for the banana reference genome sequence was provided by ANR, in collaboration with Genoscope and CIRAD (UMR AGAP). Several teams within the Global Musa Genomics Consortium (GMGC) utilized technologies such as Roche/45 and Sanger to obtain 24,425 contigs and 7,513 scaffolds, resulting in a total genome length of 472.2 Mb. Approximately 90% of the assembly was performed in 647 scaffolds, with a scaffold N50 of 1.3 Mb. A total of 36,542 protein-coding genes were identified in the genome.

Martin et al. from CIRAD and their collaborators developed a modular bioinformatics pipeline to enhance the assembly of genomic sequences in 2016. This approach resulted in a significant improvement, reducing the total number of Musa scaffolds from 7,513 to 1,532 (i.e., 80% reduction) and increasing the scaffold N50 from 1.3 Mb (65 scaffolds) to 3.0 Mb (26 scaffolds). As a result, 89.5% of the assembly was anchored to 11 Musa chromosomes, compared to the previous 70%.

Belser et al. from the University of Paris-Saclay and their collaborators utilized Oxford nanopore long reads to generate a chromosome-scale assembly of the Musa acuminata banana genome. Using a PromethION flowcell R9.4.1, the researchers obtained a sequencing dataset of approximately 93 Gb. The resulting assembly consisted of 124 contigs with a cumulative size of 485 Mbp and a contig N50 of 32 Mbp.

The DH-PKW genotype belongs to Musa balbisiana, which contributed the B-subgenome to the planted heterozygous triploid banana. This project was led by CATAS and BGI in collaboration with CIRAD. The reference genome was obtained using PacBio, Illumina, and HI-C technologies. It involved 58.99 Gb (113×) of PacBio single-molecule long reads and 86.34 Gb (166×) of Illumina paired-end and mate-pair reads for assembly, resulting in 492.77 Mb of scaffolds. The final assembled contig N50 was 1.83 Mb, and the scaffold N50 was 5.05 Mb. Additionally, a high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) library was constructed for DH-PKW, generating 72 Gb (138×) of Hi-C paired-end reads. Eventually, 430 Mb of assembly and 94.0% of genes were mapped to 11 chromosome groups. Gene annotation identified 35,148 protein-coding genes in the B genome, with 33,137 located on 11 pseudo-chromosomes.

Musa schizocarpa is a wild banana species native to the island of New Guinea. Genetic characteristics of this species have been identified in certain banana cultivars. The genome sequencing of Musa schizocarpa was accomplished through a collaborative effort between the French sequencing center Genoscope and CIRAD, with financial support from the French company Génomique within the Dynamo project. The genome sequence of Musa schizocarpa was obtained using Nanopore and optical mapping techniques, resulting in a chromosome-scale assembly with high allelic N50s (>5Mb). A total of 32,809 protein-coding genes were predicted in the genome.

Reference

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