The partnership between Elo Life Systems and Dole Food will work on developing new varieties of bananas with resistance to Fusarium wilt fungal disease
Dole Foods and Elo Life to develop fungus-resistant bananas. (Credit: Pixabay/SatyaPrem)
Elo Life Systems, an American food and agriculture company, has partnered with Dole Food Company to develop multiple varieties of bananas including Cavendish, with resistance to Fusarium wilt, a fungal disease with devastating results.
Caused by plant pathogen fungus Fusarium, Fusarium wilt is claimed to spread at pandemic proportions, threatening the cultivation of the $25bn banana industry. The disease was first detected in Columbia last August and is expected across the Latin American region.
Under the partnership, Elo has taken the primary responsibility to discover, evaluate and develop multiple approaches to bring resistance to the fungal disease.
Elo plans to develop TR4-resistant banana varieties
Elo will use its tools including knowledge mining platform, gene discovery pipeline, trait validation workflows, and end-to-end expertise in translational agriculture, in combination with its homing endonuclease-based genome editing platform to develop potential TR4-resistant banana varieties as a resistance to the disease.
Dole has been tasked with the responsibility of field evaluation and commercialisation of Fusarium TR4-resistant Cavendish varieties. It has also agreed to fully fund the research and development at Elo, in addition to paying royalties on the final product.
Elo Life Systems CEO Fayaz Khazi said: “Spread of Fusarium wilt would not only have devastating consequences to the banana industry but also have a significant economic impact on farmers in the affected regions whose livelihoods depend on exports of the Cavendish banana. To date, chemical and cultural approaches to control this disease have been unsuccessful.
“We’re excited to work with Dole, which shares Elo’s vision to improve the security and sustainability of the global food supply, to address this critical need and help develop new varieties that leverage natural resistance within several relatives of the Cavendish banana.”
Dole Foods tropical products innovation R&D director Patricio Gutiérrez said: “Bananas are not only the most popular fruit in the United States, but together with plantains, they are a staple food on which much of the world depends for sustenance.
“Our investment in this strategic project reflects our aspiration to improve a critically important food crop while helping farmers meet the continuous challenges to produce this food for the planet.”