What is it about?
The fungus causing Fusarium wilt, also known as Panama disease, threatens banana crops worldwide. One particular strain of this fungus is particularly dangerous because it infects the Cavendish banana; this is the variety that is grown for most international trade and was previously thought to be disease resistant. We mapped the entire DNA of this fungus and made this data freely available.
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Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Availability of complete DNA sequence is really useful for developing methods to detect, identify and manage diseases of crops. There is more than one way to do 'genome sequencing' and some methods produce better-quality data than others. We were the first to publicly release a genome sequence for TR4 based on the 'long-read' DNA sequencing method. This produced a essentially complete DNA sequence whereas previously available data generated by 'short-read' methods were incomplete.
Perspectives
As the TR4 fungus has recently broken out in Latin America, I hope that this data will be helpful in the fight against the disease that could devastate economies and livelihoods. This work is part of a larger project about bananas between The University of Exeter and the Eden Project.
Dr David J Studholme
University of Exeter
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: High-Quality Draft Genome Sequence of the Causal Agent of the Current Panama Disease Epidemic, Microbiology Resource Announcements, September 2019, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/mra.00904-19.
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