the plants exhibited a yield drag. Taiwanese researchers believe that the onset of TR4 was linked to soil degradation caused by the use of chemical fertilizers. Hong et al 2020 achieved significant suppression with a chilli pepper/banana rotation. This success is not merely applicable to Musa or even crops in general - it suggests that a similar "rotation" concept in livestock is advisable. The resistance of different banana cultivars to the pathogen is under scrutiny. Banana breeding impeded by triploidy One major impediment to breeding bananas is polyploidy; Gros Michel and Cavendish bananas are triploid and thus attempts at meiosis in the plant's ovules cannot produce a viable gamete. Only rarely does the first reduction division in meiosis in the plants' flowers tidily fail completely, resulting in a euploid triploid ovule, which can be fertilized by normal haploid pollen from a diploid banana variety; a whole stem of bananas would contain only a few seeds and sometimes none. As a result, the resulting new banana variety is tetraploid, and thus contains seeds; the market for bananas is not accustomed to bananas with seeds. Experience showed that where both meiosis steps failed, causing a heptaploid seedling, or when the seedling is aneuploid, results are not as good. Second-generation breeding using those new tetraploids as both parents has tended not to yield good results, because the first generation contains the Gros Michel triploid gene set intact (plus possibly useful features in the added fourth chromosome set), but in the second generation, the Gros Michel gene set has been broken up by meiosis. The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research cultivates several varieties of the Gros Michel. They have succeeded in producing a few seeds by hand-pollinating the flowers with pollen from diploid seeded bananas. See also List of banana and plantain diseases Black sigatoka (a leaf-spot disease of banana plants caused by the ascomycete fungus Mycosphaerella fijiensis (Morelet)) References Further reading (discusses the disease threat to banana crops) (less technical explanation) External links "Fusarium wilt of banana" on ProMusa's Musapedia Can This Fruit be Saved? Fusarium Wilt - A global threat to the banana Banana diseases 1950s in Panama Banana Wars Fungal plant pathogens and diseases