Banana family's shrinking chromosomes helped shape their brightly colored flower bracts
Fu N, Sun P, Liu X, Liu TJ, Wang YB
Genomics
The showy pink and red bracts on ornamental bananas like the ones sold as landscape plants come from pigment genes switched on by regulators, so breeders can now target those switches to develop new colors.
Bananas and their relatives started with 17 chromosome pairs and lost some over time as pieces of chromosomes fused and rearranged. Researchers read the complete DNA of an ornamental banana with bright bracts, the colorful leaf-like covers around its flowers. They found that the bright color comes mostly from genes being turned up, not from having extra copies of pigment genes.
Key Findings
Built a telomere-to-telomere, gap-free genome of Musa exotica, an early-branching ornamental banana with brightly colored bracts.
Reconstructed an ancestral Musaceae karyotype with 17 chromosomes (n = 17), with stepwise reductions to n = 11, 10, and 9 through lineage-specific inter-chromosomal rearrangements.
Rearranged regions are enriched for anthocyanin pathway genes (CHS, F3H, MYB, bHLH); bract color is driven by coordinated expression of CHS, CHI, F3'5'H and ANS, largely independent of gene copy number.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists assembled a complete genome of an ornamental banana relative with bright bracts and used it to trace how the banana family's chromosomes shrank from 17 pairs to as few as 9. The same shuffled regions carry genes that control the pigments behind colorful bracts.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Ancestral karyotype reconstruction provides insights into stepwise chromosome evolution and bract coloration in the banana family.
The banana family (Musaceae) exhibits remarkable diversity in karyotype structure and bract coloration, yet the evolutionary dynamics of chromosome rearrangements and the regulatory basis underlyin...
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A banana is an elongated, edible fruit—botanically a berry—produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa. In some countries, cooking bananas are called plantains, distinguishing them from dessert bananas. The fruit is variable in size, color and firmnes...