If you think it’s those little black dots in the middle of the fruit, you’re wrong. In fact, the most consumed banana varieties do not have seeds. “The black dots are just unfertilized ovules from the banana flower”, says agronomist Oscar Ramon Pena Bendeck, from the Luiz de Queiroz Higher School of Agriculture (Esalq), in Piracicaba (SP).
Bananas with seeds are a privilege of wild species, which in Brazil can appear in coastal regions of the Atlantic Forest. “A student of mine found one of these in Serra do Mar, in São Paulo. When he bit into the fruit, he almost lost his teeth: it was full of seeds”, says biologist Marcos Arduin, from Ufscar. Traditional types, however, reproduce by so-called vegetative propagation, where shoots of new plants emerge from the parent plant. In the case of bananas, they appear from the so-called rhizome, a structure at the base of the banana tree from which the roots and stem emerge.
The great advantage of this type of reproduction is that the seedling reaches the adult stage in much less time than the fruits that begin to grow from a seed. “But the biggest disadvantage is that all banana trees will be identical to the mother plant. If the plant that gave rise to the sprouts is susceptible to diseases, the descendants will be too”, says another agronomist, Adriano Stephan Nascente, from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Rondônia.
For bananas, the problem is especially serious, as fungi that cause disease have already drastically reduced the productivity of plantations of silver banana and apple banana in Asia, Africa, Central America and northern Brazil. The situation is so dangerous that, earlier this year, a group of Belgian scientists warned that the fruit could disappear in ten years. As microorganisms survive most pesticides, the best way is to cross different species to obtain fungi-immune varieties.
“Until now, researchers have already produced several types that are resistant to the disease, but with a slightly different flavor from the most consumed varieties”, says Adriano.
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