Humans have been "taming" bananas for 5,000 years, which can be said to be the most difficult fruit in human history to cultivate, and now bananas, as one of the top three fruits in global production, humans eat 100 billion roots every year, but this time they have a high probability of leaving people.
In today's fruit kingdom, bananas definitely belong to the first echelon, taking the annual fruit consumption ranking of 1.4 billion people in our country as an example, bananas rank fifth after watermelon, apples, grapes and citrus. There can be no durian on every fruit stall on the street, there can be no cherries, but there must be bananas, but now tell you that the bananas that people love are about to become extinct with a high probability, and many people who love bananas are estimated to be very sad.
What was even more surprising at that time was that before 1950, people ate bananas that were actually more delicious, but that variety had long disappeared, and the bananas that people eat now were actually bananas with second-rate tastes, and now this second-rate banana is about to leave people. What is the difference between a more delicious banana from a more delicious banana 70 years ago and a banana today? In the face of the fact that the "second-rate banana" is about to disappear, is there any way for human beings to remedy it?
In order to clarify this doubt, we also need to start with the banana that "accompanied" humans 5,000 years ago.
There is a question, who was the first person in the world to eat bananas? The answer is an ancient man who lived 5,000 years ago on the island of Papua New Guinea, the largest island in the Pacific.
New Guinea island is located in the tropics, humid and hot all year round, suitable climatic conditions for the growth of bananas to provide the best living environment, in general, banana trees are more than two meters high, and the island's banana trees up to 25 meters, the world's largest banana was also born here, 30 cm long, weighing 4 pounds, a person can not eat.
As early as 5,000 years ago, the island's indigenous people began to "tame" wild bananas, but at that time, the banana meat had a lot of very hard seeds, and the taste was not so soft and sweet, if you were not careful, you would have eaten the teeth.
In the Age of Discovery, European merchants used cargo ships to bring banana trees around the world, and large-scale commercial cultivation and artificial cultivation finally evolved the bananas with extremely small seeds and soft and sweet flesh.
Until 1950, humans ate a very soft and sweet banana, called the "big mac" banana. Its outer skin is thick, more suitable for long-distance transportation, and its thick appearance, because the big mac banana contains more flavor substances called isoamyl acetate than the current banana. Therefore, the aroma is more intense.
But by the 1950s and 1960s, the banana had magically disappeared.
Many people like to buy some banana-flavored snacks and drinks, but found that compared with the real banana taste they usually eat, the aroma of snacks and drinks is obviously more sufficient and more intense, and those who do not understand the inside story also think that people deliberately make more aromatic flavors, in fact, these snacks and drinks imitate the taste of the common bananas eaten by humans 70 years ago. The so-called banana flavor is the addition of more isoamyl acetate.
The mystery of the disappearance of the Big Mac banana has a lot to do with the way humans cultivate bananas.
Biologically, the way organisms reproduce offspring can be roughly divided into sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction.
When humans first cultivated more delicious banana varieties, in order to evolve more delicious characteristics for bananas, and to be able to pass on delicious characteristics from generation to generation, asexual reproduction was used to cultivate bananas from generation to generation.
In this process, although the sweet and delicious characteristics are steadily passed on, it also causes a fatal problem.
In the process of sexual reproduction, the genes of organisms can communicate with each other, which is conducive to the development of more diverse biological characteristics, while the asexual reproduction gene is very stable, and it is difficult to develop new universal disease resistance characteristics only through its own genetic mutations, resulting in all asexual reproduction bananas being too similar in genes.
Once a large-scale fungal invasion occurs, it will cause disaster to the banana population.
This happened to Big Mack Banana that year.
At that time, a fungus called "Fusarium sharpened" invaded the Big Mac banana, and once the banana tree was contaminated with this fungus, it would stay in the root of the banana tree, releasing toxins and causing mass death of banana tree cells.
What is even more helpless is that for this fungal disease, human beings are powerless to watch the big mac banana tree fall down, this incurable fungus soon invaded almost all the big mac banana orchards in the world, at that time, the price of bananas also soared, to the extent that ordinary people could not afford to buy.
Since the Big Mac banana is about to become extinct, human beings can not let the banana disappear on the earth, so scientists mobilized, and finally in 1947 to develop a new variety of disease-resistant bananas, called Hua Banana, also known as Xiangling Banana.
Now everyone eats bananas belong to the fragrant banana, although the taste is worse than the big mac, but humans have also saved the banana as a fruit, until today.
Although the plantain escaped the infectious disease that year, the yellow leaf disease was also escalating, and finally in the 1990s, it was discovered that a new yellow leaf disease could also infect the fragrant banana!
Today, banana plantations in Asia, Africa and other places have been infected with this fungus, and banana orchards in the Americas have temporarily survived, but in today's so developed globalization, even if there is no banana orchard infected with this yellow leaf disease, infection will happen sooner or later.
In the face of this crisis faced by bananas, human beings still have corresponding remedies.
First of all, the first and most stupid way, that is, physical isolation, which means that the banana orchards that are not yet infected with the disease are physically isolated to protect them from fungal infections, such as strict control of banana products, seeds, soils, etc. from the epidemic area.
This method can only be said to be effective for a while, and it is not a long-term solution. Otherwise, more than 70 years ago, Big Mac bananas would not have been infected with yellow leaf disease worldwide.
The second method is to cultivate new varieties of disease-resistant bananas on the basis of diploid wild bananas, but cultivating new varieties is never a one-time thing, and the cultivation of new varieties is not able to resist new xanthophyll disease, after all, bananas are eaten, taking into account taste and disease resistance.
The last time the Big Mac banana went extinct and the new banana was bred, the level of banana taste that humans ate has been greatly reduced. Nowadays, the taste of newly cultivated bananas is getting better or worse.
The third method is gene editing technology to improve bananas, that is, directly using gene editing technology to directly edit the disease resistance genes of wild bananas to make them directly resistant to the banana, without making the taste worse. It is even possible to genetically edit the better-tasting Big Mac bananas to directly breed new bananas with better taste and better drug resistance.
But this gene editing technology, many people also have doubts.
To sum up, although the asexual propagation of bananas retains the stability of taste, but also led to a single disease resistance, making the disease resistance extremely poor, historically, the big mac banana has suffered a catastrophe, and now the panda banana is once again facing this situation, we still hope that biologists will develop a more delicious banana with disease resistance a day earlier, so that humans will not have cheap and sweet bananas to eat.