Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard
Once you cross two Musas to produce seeds, the question is whether the offspring will be seeded. If you grow it out and find that it is seeded, you'll then have the task of re-crossing to produce a sterile hybrid. A seeded banana is inedible -- or at best a difficult culinary task.
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yup getting a cold hardy seedless is the goal. Obviously there's no guarantee it would happen, but it certainly won't happen if nobody tries (or not enough people try). Even getting a success in those terms doesn't mean I would end up with a particularly tasty banana. This all seems pretty straightforward. Now I'm starting to wonder if it would just be easier to try and treat a bunch of hardy banana seed with colchicine and induce polyploidy.
according to (these folks who induced polyploidy in Musa via colchicine): link didn't work but if you google "the experimental formation of polyploidy and its effect in the genus musa" a jstor article should pop right up
most of their tetraploids reverted to diploid but they did have plants revert to triploid. Now I'm not sure how long it took these plants to finish their mishmashed genetic free for all, but wouldn't it be cool if all it took to get a seedless cool weather hardy banana was soaking some Musa velutina (not necessarily a large or marketable banana but the same could be tried with M. sikkimensis, M. cheesmani, and helens hybrid) seed in colchicine?