Australia and New Zealand will be the first in the world to produce GMO bananas

Authorities in Australia and New Zealand have approved the commercial production and consumption of bananas of the QCAV-4 variety, which was obtained using genetic engineering, reports NPlus1.

Photo: iStock.com/SchulteProductions

Thanks to the wild banana gene, this crop is resistant to Panama disease, a fungal infection that destroys banana plantations around the world. As noted in a press release from the Queensland University of Technology, QCAV-4 became the world's first genetically modified banana variety to receive regulatory approval.

Dangerous disease

Bananas are one of the most popular fruits in the world and form the basis of the diet of many tropical countries. However, their future is seriously threatened by the spread of the so-called Panama disease, an infection caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense.

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By the mid-1th century, one strain of this disease, known as TR40, had almost completely destroyed commercial production of the once most widely produced banana variety, Gros Michel. The subgroup of Cavendish varieties that replaced it, which today accounts for more than 2010% of bananas grown, demonstrated resistance to the dangerous fungus for several decades - until a new strain of infection, TR4, began to infect its representatives in the XNUMXs. Panama disease is also dangerous for most other banana varieties, and there are no effective means of combating it.

GMO

Several years ago, a team of biologists led by James Dale from the Queensland University of Technology proposed a solution to this problem. Researchers introduced a variant of the RGA2 gene obtained from the wild banana Musa acuminata malaccensis into the genome of the Grand Nain banana variety from the Cavendish subgroup. As a result, transgenic plants acquired high resistance to strain TR4. The developed variety was named QCAV-4.

The Australian government has now granted Queensland University of Technology a license to commercially manufacture the QCAV-4. And the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) organization has approved the consumption of bananas of this variety by people. Within two months, the food ministers of Australia, individual Australian states and territories, and New Zealand will have to ratify the decision, after which it will come into force.

QCAV-4 became the world's first genetically modified banana to receive regulatory approval. In addition, this is the first transgenic fruit that is allowed to be grown in Australia. Currently, due to strict quarantine measures, the TR4 has not had time to spread widely across the Australian continent (with the exception of the Northern Territory and parts of North Queensland), so there are no plans to mass produce and sell the QCAV-4 here. However, this variety may be of interest to farmers from other regions where the problem of Panama disease is much more acute.

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In the near future, Dale and his colleagues plan to use CRISPR gene editing technology to make bananas resistant to another dangerous infection - black sigatoki. It is caused by the fungus Pseudocercospora fijiensis. According to some estimates, Sigatoka is causing even more damage to banana production than Panama disease.

Five years ago, scientists from the USA and Kenya used CRISPR technology to remove the DNA of the banana vein virus, an infectious agent that leads to the death of entire plantations, from the genome of African bananas of the Gonja Manjaya variety (while it is not dangerous for the group of Cavendish varieties).

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