The production of bananas is threatened by rapid spreading of various diseases and adverse environmental conditions. The preservation and characterization of banana diversity is essential for the purposes of crop improvement. The world's largest banana germplasm collection maintained at the Bioversity International Transit Centre (ITC) in Belgium is continuously expanded by new accessions of ed...

Satellite DNA sequences consist of tandemly arranged repetitive units up to thousands nucleotides long in head-to-tail orientation. The evolutionary processes by which satellites arise and evolve include unequal crossing over, gene conversion, transposition and extra chromosomal circular DNA formation. Large blocks of satellite DNA are often observed in heterochromatic regions of chromosomes an...

J. Christiansen, P. Farthouat, L. Feld, M. Hansen, K. Klein, K. Kloukinas, L. Mapelli, L. Musa, M. Newcomer, E. Petrolo, S. Quinton, W. Smith, F. Vasey, K. Wyllie, R. Yarema a CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland b RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany c University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA d INFN, Rome, Italy e Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, Great Britain f University of Wisconsin, Madis...

Banana is one of the world's favorite fruits and one of the most important crops for developing countries. The banana reference genome sequence (Musa acuminata) was recently released. Given the taxonomic position of Musa, the completed genomic sequence has particular comparative value to provide fresh insights about the evolution of the monocotyledons. The study of the banana genome has been en...

Unraveling widespread polyploidy events throughout plant evolution is a necessity for inferring the impacts of whole-genome duplication (WGD) on speciation, functional innovations, and to guide identification of true orthologs in divergent taxa. Here, we employed an integrated syntenic and phylogenomic analyses to reveal an ancient WGD that shaped the genomes of all commelinid monocots, includi...

Karyotype, host preference, isozyzme patterns, morphometrics, and mating behavior of two burrowing nematode populations from Hawaii, one infecting Anthurium sp. and the second infecting Musa sp., were compared with Radopholus similis and R. citrophilus populations from Florida. The population from Anthurium sp. had five chromosomes (n = 5), and that from Musa sp. had four (n = 4). Neither of th...

Analysis of cDNA-AFLP was used to study the genes expressed in zygotic and somatic embryogenesis of Musa acuminata Colla ssp. malaccensis, and a comparison was made between their differential transcribed fragments (TDFs) and the sequenced genome of the double haploid- (DH-) Pahang of the malaccensis subspecies that is available in the network. A total of 253 transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) ...

The islands of Batan and Rapu Rapu in southeastern Luzon, Philippines, were surveyed for filariasis from November 1984 to May 1985. Microfilariae of Bancroftian filariasis were detected in 10.5% of the people over one year of age. Microfilarial rates and intensity of infection were the same for males and females. The highest rates for both sexes were in the 56- to 60-year-old age group. Aedes p...

This paper analyzes the relationship between Voas s soft ware testability measure and Musa s fault exposure ratio K It has come to our attention that industrial users of Musa s model employ his published experimental value for K x for their projects instead of creating their own K estimate for the system whose reliability is being as sessed We provide a theoretical argument for how a slight mod...