Annals of Botany XX: 1–18, 2018 doi: 10.1093/aob/mcy156, available online at www.academic.oup.com/aob RESEARCH IN CONTEXT East African diploid and triploid bananas: a genetic complex transported from Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/aob/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/aob/mcy156/5104470 by Bioversity International user on 09 October 2018 South-East Asia Xavier Perrier1,2,*, Christophe Jenny1,2, Frédéric Bakry1,2, Deborah Karamura3, Mercy Kitavi4, Cécile Dubois1,2, Catherine Hervouet1,2, Gérard Philippson5,6 and Edmond De Langhe7 1CIRAD, UMR AGAP, F-34398 Montpellier, France, 2AGAP, Université de Montpellier, CIRAD, INRA, Montpellier SupAgro, Montpellier, France, 3Bioversity International Uganda Office, PO Box 24384, Kampala, Uganda,4 International Potato Center, PO Box 25171, Nairobi, Kenya, 5Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, France and 6Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage CNRS, Université Lyon 2, France and 7Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), Belgium *For correspondence. E-mail
[email protected] Received: 20 April 2018 Returned for revision: 18 June 2018 Editorial decision: 20 July 2018 Accepted: 27 July 2018 • Background and Aims Besides bananas belonging to the AAA triploid Mutika subgroup, which predominates in the Great Lakes countries, other AAA triploids as well as edible AA diploids, locally of considerable cultural weight, are cultivated in East Africa and in the nearby Indian Ocean islands as far as Madagascar. All these varie- ties call for the genetic identification and characterization of their interrelations on account of their regional socio- economic significance and their potential for banana breeding strategies. • Methods An extensive sampling of all traditional bananas in East Africa and near Indian Ocean islands was genotyped with simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, with particular emphasis on the diploid forms and on the bananas of the Indian Ocean islands, which remain poorly characterized.