Biotechnological interventions in banana: current knowledge and future prospects

Banana is an important food crop responsible for ensuring food security, nutrition, and employment for a significant portion of the world population. It has fairly broad genetic diversity and is distributed widely across the globe. Due to its socio-economic importance, there has been growing demand for healthy and improved planting materials of banana. In recent years many companies and organizations are working hard to narrow down the gap between demand and supply of quality planting materials. The other challenges includes its susceptibility to adverse environmental conditions, attack of various pests/pathogens and improvement of nutritional quality of bananas. To address these issues, refinement of existing techniques and introduction of new experimental tools are required. However, the genetic improvement of bananas to a large extent is limited by using conventional methods due to polyploidy, heterozygosity, and sterility of this plant. For rapid multiplication and obtaining disease free and healthy plants, efficient in vitro propagation techniques and fine tuning of the existing protocols are being tried in many laboratories across the globe. Besides, for developing a successful protocol for propagation of different cultivars of bananas, a deeper understanding of the factors associated with various steps of its multiplication till transfer to the land is immensely critical. Similarly, developing biotic and abiotic stress tolerant banana and enhancing its commercial value through biotechnological interventions could be very useful. The key intent of this review is to highlight the research endeavor in this direction, associated challenges and future prospects.