Bananas (scientific question)

[zipcat]

Ok, I'm sure you've all heard that viruses are attacking the banana population.

But before I ask; I think it'd be best if I gave out a bit of history and facts.

Bananas have been domesticated since 8,000 bc (or 5,000 bc, they're not sure). It is still cultivated by cutting off a part of it and replanting it. Making a clone.
Over time, banana trees became less unique, and therefore more susceptible to viruses. Much like asexual thingies.

Here is a paper on them if you'd like to read a bit more; http://www.thedominican.net/articles/banana.htm

In the fight against the viruses, they have evolved against them; yet bananas stay the same. I'm sure there is a record somewhere... hrm.

But anyways, I've discussed this with a few professors (good friends of mine that love all my questions) but haven't figured it out.


Does anyone know what year bananas became sterile?


There has been a lot of history with us and these trees; so I think the answer would be interesting with how domestication and how human influences effect things. Double with our resent fights against those mean viruses.
(I can't believe I remembered all of that from a paper last year going over basics...lol)

[Cheshire]

You missed one detail which i find very important. The "common" banana is the one you are refering to. I read an article very much like the background you put up in, i think it was, TIME magizine .

If you live in the states (not sure how it is in europe, but i know it isn't so in south america), when you go to the super market, there typically is only one kind of banana. That is the banana that zip is refering to.

[Loth Emnati]

oh, scientific question!

Uhmm, but the answer is pretty straightforward. Domistication of bananas is to breed them asexual, so it's something that happened back in the stoneage. You don't want to eat those big banana seeds.

[Rufus Shinra]

wow, you really do learn something new everyday :p

[Rajst Kalizkhanavar]

You people have waaaaaaaaay too much free time on your hands.

:p

[Ominous]

Oh, I HEARD the year just a while ago! Uh...2012? Don't trust me on that one, though.

[Loth Emnati]

A banana with big seeds aren't really bananas, and if they were domisticated back in the stoneage, it sounds like sterilization happened back then.

[Hallia]

The bananas we eat in from gorcery stores such as HEB also are not organic. Even thouugh alot of people think all this organic stuff is bunk I've done research on that. The chemicals and growth hormones that you eat from non-oraganic food often times creates viruses them selves. It also contributes to the creation of superviruses. We pump our body with antibiotics in the food we eat so any virus strain we get has the few little "buggies" that those antibiotics don't kill. This can also happen to the actual fruit (or meat) that they infuse. So another question that should be asked is:

When did they start to create GMF bananas?

[Loth Emnati]

What is inorganic food? Somekind of geneless food? I'm amazed.
Here the other day I heard a dietist that could solve overweight problems with a diet on synthetic meat. *shakes his head*

But putting language confusion aside Halia has a point. If we use antibacteria on a daily basis, we provoke resistant bacteria. Bacteria has a very elegant way of sharing genes and is not restricted to share within its kind.

If you use antibacterial "X" for three month on a banana farm, and create resistant bacterias, then these bacteria will transfer to your stumick upon intake of the banana and possibly share the resistant genes with your normal flora. That doesn't sound too bad, but there are only a handful of major antibacterial types, so X might be related Y, Z and W - which are used to cure humans.

One antibacteral you've heard of is Penicilin? Which is the best antibacterial we have discovered so far, but many countries have stopped treating their patients with it, because it doesn't work. Spain have reported up to 90% resistance to penicilin!

Though it might sound like an escalating pharmaceutical catastrophe, it is not. It seems unfavorable for the bacterias to posses these resistance genes, and if they are not exposed to the particular antibacterial then they will lose their resistance over time. All it takes is strict govermental control of antibiotics, both for human and in the food industry. Not to mention ban of all imported food that has been treated with antibiotics.

It is possible. Look to the scandinavian countries (and holland.)
The worst place to have resistant bacteria is in hospitals, because people who are there aren't normally capable of fighting back much more than small infections. If foreigners get sick while in Denmark (where I'm from) they will get quarentined. The hospitals take no chances with multiresistant bacteria

[Loth Emnati]

*changes profile to say: "student, biochemstry"*

[Cheshire]

then do what i do, don't eat bananas


Can't remember where i read it, but infants/very young childern who go to a pre-school or somekind of place where they come in contact with other kids, they are more resistant to the common disease than the kids who just stay at home during that age-period

[Loth Emnati]

Chesh: That is something different. That is mostly due to vira and is because of the human immune system. A complicated case, which we do not share with bacteria at all. Bacteria resitance to antibiotics and mans increased immune response if exposed to the same kind of vira/bacteria during infancy is something completely different.

The humane immune system has a knowledge of prior infections and can respond faster and quicker to an infection if exposed earlier. That is why you see some people beeing immune to plaque while other die like flies. If you survive the plaque once, you're immune for the rest of your life. For some reason that increased response upon second infection is further increased if you were at first exposed to the vira/bacteria at infancy or early childhood.

This is by no mean my speciality (immunology is on the border between biology and biochemistry) but I don't think we have a set in stone explaination on why this is so. The immune system is smart. *thumbs up* to mother nature!

Bacterias "immune" defenses are purely derived from numbers. Only one single cell in a colony of uncomprehendable many cells need to survive the antibiotics treatment, then that cell will proliferate and a new and resistant colony will grow exponential from that single "lucky" cell.

[Cheshire]

I was infering that we let our bodies get use to it instead of pumpin our food with the antiboditics

[Loth Emnati]

oh, but the big sinner is the food industry that sees huge advantage in pumping their products with antibiotics. A pig doesn't live very long, and the chance to get a secondary infection is slim, so the most important thing to the farmer is that the piglet grows strong and healthy over a short timespan. Antibiotics helps with that.

[Hallia]

"organic" food is food made with no pesticides, growth horomones, or antibiotics. "inorganic" food is food made with pesticides, growth horomones, and antibiotics. So organic is old school farming and inorganic is the "farming of the future".

There's a great book about this whole GMF topic called the Maker's diet.