Volume 2 begins with a discussion of progress in identifying and broadening the genetic base for Musa species. This provides the foundation for Parts 3 and 4 which review advances in both conventional and recent molecular breeding techniques and their application in producing improved varieties.
Dr Gert Kema is Professor of Tropical Plant Pathology at the Laboratory for Phytopathology of Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. He leads several international banana research programs, including interdisciplinary research projects and public-private-partnerships focusing on Panama disease and black Sigatoka. He is a cofounder of several spin-off companies focusing on banana improvement, disease management and bioprocessing.
Dr André Drenth is Professor in Tropical Plant Pathology and Theme Leader for crop protection in the Centre for Horticultural Science at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI), at the University of Queensland. He leads several projects on tropical plant diseases and he initiated and led a national Banana Plant Protection Programme set up to protect Australia's banana industry from the impact of a range of pests and diseases.
Mike Smith has 43 years of research experience with tropical/subtropical fruit and root crops. Our laboratory has specialised in applied research with an emphasis on strong industry partnerships. We have successfully developed in vitro propagation techniques to multiply elite varieties of banana, ginger, pineapple, papaya, avocado, custard apple and macadamia, as well as further consolidating our work with the genetic improvement of pineapple, ginger and banana. Major achievements with our banana research program include:
- establishment of one of the world's major in vitro collections of Musa germplasm and, concomitantly, the introduction, multiplication, distribution and evaluation of new, disease-resistant banana varieties from breeding programs around the world.
- establishment of a Quality Banana Approved Nursery (QBAN) Scheme, via a network of commercial tissue culture laboratories and nurseries, whereby growers can have access to clean, uniform planting material with improved productivity.
- resolution of two major problems in commercial banana tissue culture (eg. virus transmission and somaclonal variation) so that growers can be assured the material they purchase is free from disease and true-to-type.
- development of Cavendish bananas with improved tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses, including Fusarium wilt, using mutation breeding.
- development of robust and reliable banana transformation systems.
Emeritus professor of plant cytogenetics at Wageningen University, Laboratory of Genetics, Wageningen, the Netherlands. I focus on structure and behavior of plant chromosomes in relation to gamete sterility and unbalanced chromosomes segregation. Research projects are mostly related to plant breeding programs and deal with altered chromosome behavior in meiosis. In addition, I have worked on chromosome differentiation using high-resolution fluorescence in situ hybridization. The outcome of this research is part of comparative genomics projects of Arabidopsis and several crop species.
After graduating in Montreal University in 2006 (M.Sc. Bio-informatique), Valentin worked as a bioinformatics research engineer in the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, LIRMM) in Montpellier on the phylogeny.fr project for 2 years. Then he joined CIRAD and participated to the GNPAnnot project and developed the Chado Controller to manage genome manual annotations.
He first joined Bioversity in 2010, as a bioinformatics specialist to mainly work on the GreenPhyl database within the Commodities programme for a 18 month contract and then returned to CIRAD.
After a 6 months contract in CIRAD, he came back to Bioversity in January 2012 till today to continue his work on gene families in GreenPhyl and is also involved in the Musa Germplasm Information System (MGIS), Banana Genome Hub (BGH), Tripal Project and the Breeding API. Valentin has mainly worked on the Banana and Cocoa genomes and participated to their sequencing. His main skills are web user interfaces, computation pipelines, algorithms, databases (CHADO) and CMS (Drupal).
