New grafting technique could combat the disease threatening Cavendish bananas

Bananas Credit: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2. Generic license. Credit:Steve Hopson Scientists have found a novel way to combine two species of grass-like plant including banana, rice and wheat, using embryonic tissue from their seeds. The technique allows beneficial characteristics, such as disease resistance or stress tolerance, to be added to the plants. Our technique allows us to add disease resistance, or other beneficial properties like salt-tolerance, to grass-like plants without resorting to genetic modification or lengthy breeding programmes Greg Reeves Grafting is the technique of joining the shoot of one plant with the root of another, so they continue to grow together as one. Until now it was thought impossible to graft grass-like plants in the group known as monocotyledons because they lack a specific tissue type, called the vascular cambium, in their stem. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that root and shoot tissues taken from the seeds of monocotyledonous grasses - representing their earliest embryonic stages - fuse efficiently.