 we can confirm that we can start these new webinar. Thank you very much for your participation and welcome to another session of our TIA for Global Network webinar series which aims to provide updated news on Tropical Race 4. My name is Victor Prada and I am the Secretary of the Volvana Forum. Volvana Forum is a multi-state holder permanent platform of assembly to address the main challenges of the banana industry. The platform or the forum is hosted in FAO headquarters accurately in the Trade and Markets division. I would like to stop here by acknowledging the support provided by the TIA for Global Network active members, their contributions and feedback to materialize these interesting webinar agenda, etc. Today, as mentioned before, we have a total of 1,234 registered participants and well these ongoing series of dialogue on a topic that is urgent, complex and multi-dimensional is also an opportunity to strengthen the relations of different stakeholders with different methodologies and realities for the benefit of millions of rural families who depend on banana production to survive. So today, the reason we are here is to talk about the TIA for persistent realities. Very quick, I would like to give you some information about the meeting itself, some housekeeping rules. Please try to keep your microphone always muted because this is for panelists if you are not speaking. If you would like to intervene, we would like to kindly ask you to raise your hand or write in the chat box and I will give you the floor as soon as possible. As is customary, the webinar will be recorded and will be published in the FIO TIA for Global Network website and the FIO YouTube channel. Then important information for the interpretation is that, as mentioned before, interpretation is available in Spanish and English and can be selected in the bar at the bottom of the website. If your sound quality is poor, is not sufficient, then that complicates the work done by the interpreters and then it will be better if you don't use built-in microphones in the computer. Instead, it's better to use a USB headset and then, yeah, if you have several people talking in the same microphone, we would really appreciate if you can speak close to the microphone. And then last suggestion would be to switch on your camera, use your camera when you're speaking and lower your mask if that's the case, if distancing allows you to do. So that's it on my end. I would like now to give the floor to Pascal Liu, Senior Economist in Trader Michael's division and team leader of the Responsible Global Value Changing. Pascal, you have the screen. Thank you. Thank you, Victor. Can you hear me well? So unclear, yes. Perfect. Okay. So ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Buenos dias, buenas tardes. Welcome to this webinar on the TIA for Resistant Banana Varieties, organized by the World Banana Forum and FAO's Subregional Office for Central America. As Victor mentioned, the WBF is the World Banana Forum is a multi-stakeholder platform. It includes all stakeholder groups involved in the banana sector globally from producer organizations, exporters, importers, retailers, governments of exporting and importing countries, research institutions, development agencies, unions of workers on banana farms, consumer associations, environmental and human rights associations, and other civic society organizations. The World Banana Forum operates through three working groups, each of them focusing on one dimension of the sustainability, environmental, social and economic sustainability, and it also operates through task forces, specialized task forces. TR4 is a great concern for the World Banana Forum. The disease, as many people know, has been spreading over decades from Asia and the Pacific to other regions, going westwards, reaching Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and more recently, it also reached the Americas and it was reported for the first time officially in the Americas in 2019 in Colombia, and then last April it was reported in Peru. So it is moving and spreading over the world and it is creating a lot of concerns among banana producers and exporters. So as a reaction to the spread of TR4, the steering committee of the World Banana Forum, this idea in 2013 to create a task force on TR4. The task force gathers experts from research institutes, national plant protection organizations, companies, producer organizations, development agencies, and also some non-governmental organizations. So the task force has been operating since 2013-2014 and in 2020, two years ago, the World Banana Forum and FEO launched jointly the Global Network on TR4, which plays the role of a global hub for dissemination of knowledge, information and good practices on TR4, also for early warning of producers and also for the dissemination of training materials and extension materials. It also plays a role of coordination of global efforts to combat the disease. The Global Network on TR4 has hundreds of participants and it reaches out to over 2,500 people involved in the banana sector globally. It can count on the experts from FEO's plant protection division and the WF secretariat and also those of the task force on TR4, plus other partners and external collaborators. Now there's a lot of concern about TR4, as I mentioned before, because once it has reached the plantation and it's in the soil, TR4 is almost impossible to eliminate and it can stay there in the soil for decades. So there's no actually very reliable, there's no reliable management method known to try, you know, to suppress the disease what's in the soil. Also more to that, spores spread very easily. They can be spread by wind, they can be spread by, you know, water courses, flooding, the movement of animals and people and equipment. So that is really creating a problem and a great threat to producers. So managing, you know, protecting a plantation or a farm against TR4 requires heavy and costly biosafety measures, you know, a very strong organization and very strict protocols that have to be complied with. So this is costly for large plantations and farms, but it is also a particular challenge for small growers who do not necessarily have the capacity and organization and resources to put up all the biosafety measures that are necessary. So it makes it even more challenging for them. So in light of this, developing varieties of bananas that are resistant to TR4, or at least tolerant of it and this can be discussed, looks like the most sustainable approach to addressing the challenge of TR4. So today we will hear about promising work in the area of developing resistant varieties and Victor will introduce the agenda for day one of this webinar. Thank you for your attention. Victor, the floor is back to you. Thank you very much Pascal for the comprehensive introduction. Now I'd like to give the screen the floor to Raísa Jauger, agricultural officer and focal point for activities on TIA4 in the subliminal office in Panama. Thank you, Raísa. Thank you very much for your remarks before we start and now I think for the sake of time we'll be good if we can go really quick through the agenda. We decided to divide the webinars today in three sections. The first one on international cooperation and breeding that will be provided by Dr. Gerkema from Wageningen University and Anker Sorensen from Gajen. Then we will have another blog on Formosana experience provided by Dr. Augustin Molina and Dr. Altus Viljo and Dr. Molina representing the Ministry of Agriculture in the Philippines and Altus Viljo and the Stenemboch University. And the third component, the third blog will be provided by Dr. Adolfo Martinez from the Honduran Foundation of Agricultural Research and also by Frédéric Barcri representing CIRA, the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development. So I'd like to remember you before we continue with the agenda that we have another day tomorrow we will continue with the activities and more panelists of course to complete the information and provide us as much knowledge and as much information as possible to the big audience we have. We have more than 500 participants now and then we will cover tomorrow aspects such as conventional breeding and resistant varieties and cover all the topics such as gene editing, resistance in cavities and obstacles and opportunities for successful banana varieties and on diversification etc. And that will be with the participation of different organizations and experiences worldwide. This webinar is the first one of a series of webinars on varieties. This is very important for you to know that we didn't have the capacity to ask or gather all the different entities and specialists or scientists working on TI4 on different varieties. So it would be really appreciated if you could kindly after these webinars because we will have more webinars following this one with more panelists. So if you have any suggestion you know all the plant pathologies or plant pathologies sorry with good resource it will be good if you could let us know. We are confident you will find this webinar really interesting and that being said I would like now to continue with the agenda on international cooperation on breeding and for that I would like to give the floor to Dr. Herkema. Dr. Herkema is an expert on fungal plant diseases such as fusallion wheel, tropical race 4 that he researched for over 10 years now. He is currently the head of the laboratory of a phytopathology at Paganingen University and coordinates major banana research programs on fusallion or banana among other topics of course. Professor Herkema also coordinated a private partnership devoted to technical solutions for banana growers. He co-founded several startup companies and has over 120 scientific papers published. So Dr. Herkema, Professor Herkema please the screen is yours. Thank you Victor and thank you very much for the invitation to be part of today's meeting. Well good day to everybody I realized that for some of the participants it's already Thursday here it's still Wednesday. Yeah so I was asked by the World Banana Forum, the FAO actually to provide you with some information on international collaborative projects. So I do this actually on behalf of the project that you see here on the first slide which is coordinated by ITA and Ronny's standard. So Ronny shared a couple of slides with me which helps me to introduce this program to you and then later on during the presentation Anker Sørensen, my colleague at Keygene will take over because he will talk about the company that we started, a breeding company in the Netherlands for bananas which is called Yellowway. So Anker will take the floor then. So I only have a couple of slides. So as I said the project that is currently ongoing funded by the Gates Foundation and some of the participants in this meeting are also collaborating in this project. It's coordinated with ITA and particularly Ronny's Fennon at the University of, the Catholic University of Leven. It's called Accelerated Breeding of Better Bananas. As you see here in this title the improvement of banana for small whole farms in the Great Lake region of Africa. So we can go to the next slide please and just click on until we have everything. Thank you very much. So this entire program really revolves around breeding highland bananas which is a major staple food in East Africa. So the average consumption of banana in that region is about 350k per person per year but these are cooking bananas. You see the examples here on the left side of the slide. And in particular I would like to draw your attention to this table in the lower left corner where you see Matoka which is one of the major staple foods with the current yields per hectare per year and the potential that we can obtain by breeding. So classical breeding in banana is extremely important to guarantee of course yield but also quality and in the framework of the meeting today of course we focus on disease resistance but the advantage of classical breeding driven by the the best technological tools is of course that we can simultaneously look at those characteristics that we would like to improve and that is of course not only resistance to fissure and wilt but for sure also to a fungal disease like Blexicatoka for instance which is a major threat all around the world. And so this is the core the core crop in the program and in the next slide you see the consortium that is involved in this program. So the next slide please. Here we go. So my series is responding is responding to my voice. So here you see the partners involved in this in this large consortium so major partners in Africa as you can see and actually the program that we are currently running is a continuation of the previous program. So Kijin and Wageningen University only joined now in the second phase so all the other partners that you see here on the screen have already worked together for four years in a program and we just entered recently. So I'm happy to introduce the program but some of the others of the other partners really know more about the ongoing activities. So but let me just finish to highlight what is our role here in this program so that's on the next slide please. Yeah so here you see the overall and our role is really in the pre-breeding part of the entire program so as you can see it's way broader it is ongoing breeding program in East Africa, sea delivery systems, data management, communication and capacity building but we are in the pre-breeding section of the program and there is more details in the next slide. Yeah so our role at Wageningen University is really revolving around effective based screening and we all are aware if you start a breeding program for disease resistance the phenotyping of your material is absolutely crucial. Well phenotyping for resistance to fissure and wilt is complicated, we have multiple genotypes of the of the fungus, we have TR4, we have race 1, we have race 2 so if you can translate or transform that physical screening by effective based screening that is really incredibly increasing your throughput and of course eventually that has to come down to mapping genes so once we have map genes, have the markers, we can really avoid phenotyping for a great deal so on the right hand side you see the students involved in the program at Wageningen University so two PhDs and one postdoc and so we focused primarily on the fungal side of the program and then in the next slide you see the key gene partners and there are also four colleagues and they focus mostly on the host side so we received, we see a second game population from ITA phenotype in Wageningen share the data with key gene who's responsible for the mapping and marker identification and so that's it in a nutshell what our role is in this international program and with that I think in the next slide I would like to hand over now to my colleague Anker Sörensson so Anker please go ahead. This maybe I can introduce him because I didn't do it at the beginning thank you very much Dr. Kema and then Anker Sörensson will continue now he has more than 25 years of experience in plant breeding, holds a master's degree on plant breeding and feed pathology and is currently the vice president of a new business section in Cajun a company has mentioned that focus on developing and applying DNA expertise in the field of molecular genetics with a focus on crop plants so both again Dr. Kema and Sörensson will as you can see will present as the efforts of Wageningen and Cajun international cooperation projects involving different institutions with the aim of improving disease resistance in bananas so Dr. or master's Mr. Sörensson the screen is yours thank you. Thank you very much Victor and also Gerth for introducing so indeed I have been busy in crop improvement my entire career that is definitely my passion but our knowledge about banana is very recent so it's only from the last four or five years that we have also entered into the improvement of the banana crop and to do to facilitate that we started indeed a company in Wageningen which is called Yellow Way which has an entire focus of developing novel varieties for the export market of bananas but the knowledge that we develop as exemplified in what Gerth Kema just showed is also very useful for many other types of bananas for instance you know where are the resisted genes how do they work and how can we effectively cross them into elite material of many different banana types I'll tell you a little bit about what we do in Yellow Way in a quite fast way to introduce the approach that we are taking and is well underway now next slide please so a general statement that we have is that I think we most of us agree that there is a big need to inducing genetic diversity in the banana markets simply because the continuation of the growth of the clone across the world with very little diversity is not sustainable exemplified by the big diseases that we now have next slide please in Yellow Way we have decided to focus on two major threats to the Cavendish banana as it is today the first one is Black Sea Katoka which is a very important component of the current production of bananas and we want to develop varieties that simply do not need spraying anymore in our resistant to this fungus which attacks the leaves and the next one the topic of today next slide please of course is the Fusarium disease Fusarium are very well known disease in many many crops we have been actually working on Fusarium for many years at Kijin but so that knowledge can also be utilized when we try to attack these fungus in the banana crop you all know the development so I won't talk too much about this but as we all know it's a very serious fact by the way we also participated in identifying the fungus when it first entered Colombia in 2019 with the technologies that we have developed to identify these different strains of Fusarium next slide please if you look at the consortium that we now have in place to attack this consists of three partners Kijin which I'm representing a Shikita company and the company Musa Radix which is also a Wageningen based company which is all about innovation in banana as a whole but this particular consortium Yellow Way this particular control is completely focused on genetic improvement of banana next slide please so the approach we are taking is what we call knowledge based breeding and it has to do with the fact that we can utilize the technologies that are developed in many other crops in terms of sequencing comparative genomics annotation of genomes we are trying to utilize those tools for the breeding of banana and in principle it our strategy is to go back to the the gene pool that is available in gene banks which contains a large amount of diversity as we know but which is not utilized in commercial variety development but if we can figure out which part of the genomes of these exotic and wild germplasm are responsible for resistances to diseases and if we can design crossing schemes and selection schemes that can bring these together in new varieties then we believe that that we will be able to develop a whole range of novel varieties for the banana industry that are very attractive for consumers and for producers but at the same times carry the necessary resistances that are available in the gene pool in this picture on the left you see that we have a re-sequenced a great amount of germplasm and so we know the genetic makeup of these bananas and we have also been able to identify resistance against TR4 in many of these accessions and that is how we want to utilize this knowledge to breed novel varieties for the future next slide please there is one thing is to get the novel resistances into elite varieties but the other is to how do you make elite variety why has Kevin Dean been so successful and why are other cultivated bananas so successful for that we compare the genomes between the different accessions and we try to figure out which regions of these are really necessary in order to get a banana that would be suitable not only for producers and consumers around the world but also will carry the necessary resistance genes so it's a combination of the background of the banana genome with the novel resistance genes next slide please just to give you a quick example that this work in banana is quite elaborate if you compare to many other crops development of segregating populations in banana is quite challenges and if you want to this is an example of how we are trying to also find the genes that are responsible for resistance so first of all we need to make the crossing populations and then each of the segregants needs to be multiplied to have enough plants to do a screening next slide that in itself is a challenge to have big enough population and this is also one of the tasks that we are doing in the IITA projects this is an example of how that works once we have multiplied these segregating plants we are exposing them to the fungus in a greenhouse setting that is a very controlled way of doing it of which we can be sure that the results that we have are good enough to be used for genetic analysis because if you want to use it for genetic analysis the results have to be pretty precise otherwise you will not be able to link the genetic makeup with the phenotype that to score in these plants so we do that in very controlled conditions and this is an example of the segregating plants from a population that we made that all score resistance so they have inherited the gene for resistant or the genes for resistance from the parry and the next slide you see the opposite another part of the population will have will not have inherited the resistant genes and if we then challenge those plants they look like this this gives us opportunity if we get results like this to actually on the next slide release genotyping experiment on the same plants and then map exactly the location in which the genotype corresponds to the phenotype and that gives us a location on the genome that that carries this resistant and once we know that we can develop molecular markers and use them in our crossing and segregation schemes so next slide please that is very useful for the breeders but what we also would like to do is to get to really understanding what are the genes that are responsible for this resistant for that we also look at what we call the transcriptome so that means which genes are being expressed when you challenge the plants with the fungus and whether it's a resistant or a susceptible reaction and that gives us a different what we call a transcriptome profiles of all of these interactions over time and that helps us to narrow down the the genes that are responsible for this resistance reaction next slide we put all this data in in modern databases that can that can search for resistant genes because we know as I said in the beginning from other plants and from other crops which genes are usually have the signature that gives resistance so this is the way where we come from genetics to the genes that are responsible for the resistances and once we know that the breeding process is much much more effective next slide so you might wonder why we set this up in Wageningen and that seems a bit difficult because there are no bananas growing in Wageningen so what we also had to do is to set up all the things you need to do as a breeder for making crosses and we do that in controlled greenhouses here indeed in Wageningen so we set up tropical greenhouses that are really high so that bananas can grow high that's where we grow all our wild germ plasm and we make the process between the different accessions the deliberate crosses of the ones that have the genotypes that we are looking for to combine in the varieties that has been quite a challenge because crossing is not easy in bananas you need good pollen viability the seeds are very easily deteriorating quality so all this has to be set up in order to make this a success and now we have that on the control after the first three years of research so we are now able to scale up this significantly in the next years next slide please and at the same time we are setting up that field trial location in the Philippines so that the the varieties that we will develop can also be tested in the field so it's it's nice to have the results from the greenhouse about the resistances but in the end we also want to see how they perform in fields so for that our partner Misarad is is setting up these field trial locations so that we can test the novel genetics also in these locations in the coming years once we get them out of the greenhouse next slide which i think is the last one when with that i'd like to thank you for the opportunity to present our work here today thank you very much doctor doctor kema and and mr sorensen it was very interesting your presentation according to the agenda we decided that we will leave the the qa the questions and answer section until the the end of the of the second block of of the presentations so if that's okay we will continue with the agenda so for that i would like to now continue with the former sana experience in asia for that i would like to give the floor to dr agustín molina who is a research and development expert and technical advisor of the department of agriculture of the philippines he holds a phd in plant pathology by the pennsylvania state university and is internationally recognized for for significant contributions to the research and development particularly in the areas of integrated tests and this is management with emphasis on for siren will and banana book it up this is agustín has been actively involved in the global research efforts addressing important tests and diseases conservation and use of banana genetic diversity particularly in asia and the pacific it has worked on tf4 for more than two decades with regional partners in the scientific and industry sectors in the philippines asia and as a senior scientist and regional coordinates coordinator of biodiversity international for asia and the pacific he will present now the former sana experience in asia with the focus in the philippines dr molina thank you very much and we really appreciate that you are still do you bear with us even though it's very late in the philippines so thank you and the screen is yours you need to unmute your microphone please now yes now i have to put if you'd like to share your screen i will stop sharing and then you will have the bottom to share it yes yeah you can share my screen now because i will talk i will talk with my screen not not yet you need to click in the bottom that we identified this morning he says share screen in the lower part of the browser i cannot sit now i am uh is in the lower part of the browser uh below participants you will see it's a green bottom it's highlighted because usually for panelists it's in green hi and my can you still hear me we can hear you sound unclear yes yes i cannot find my my my representation now here no worries this is precisely why we have a plan b and the plan b is is that i will present it for you and then you will just need to let me know when i am supposed to move to the next slide can you please say dr molina yes let me see because i have some changes i have removed some oh my goodness i it was working earlier now i is can you still hear me we can hear you yes yeah you might as well use my my screen my my the presentation that i sent to you yes it's in the screen already i cannot mine is i cannot see anything here shall i launch the meeting again no wait a second matthews can you confirm that you can see the powerpoint in full screen yes i can see victor full screen isn't it yes dr molina everybody can see your screen i am inside one i think we lost him okay i would really appreciate if our panelists and participants have a little bit of patience okay dr molina i will share my my screen you you find it yes i can find it now okay this first the bottom you cannot start screen share while the other participants sharing it says here that's why i didn't try again please no i cannot i am not sharing my screen now there's no one there are no screens shared dr molina can you hear me yes i can hear you now uh let's go back to your screen and and i have no problem i have a problem here with my screen okay now i am sharing okay your powerpoint i mean slide one good afternoon to everyone and uh it's already midnight here and i'm i hope i can finish my presentation without sleeping uh next slide please next slide please yeah my presentation will revolve around my experiences our experiences in asia pacific on the use of a resistant variety called pormosana and i supposed to start my my presentation with the obvious uh institute that produced the the variety pormosana that's the taiwan banana research institute which used a very conventional breeding approach but um i would like to start it from the pilippines where i was based as the regional coordinator of asia pacific of diversity international because uh it's in the pilippines is the biggest cavendish producer for the trade in the whole of asia it's actually number one and you can see in the in the slide that it's 85 000 hectares since your major source of revenue in the philippine actually banana is number two export uh agricultural export in the philippines uh next slide please next slide please and the tropical race for started in the philippines in the year 2000 very rarely i just joined the biodiversity at that time but i'm very familiar with tropical race for because i was the research director of jekita in the 1990s when uh we established plantations in indonesia and malaysia and it was abandoned because of the attack of tr4 so in 2000 i was seeing already the infection in the bow it continued to progress but we were not kind of people were not kind of attentive because they thought it was the original it says a more mild strain of paratom disease while of course it's the the virulent tr4 next slide please next slide please so in 2006 2005 2006 we did the survey to verify what exactly is this new epidemic so we did the survey in 2005 my objective then was to convince the industry that there is we are dealing a new and virulent disease so in 2006 we confirmed with stelenbush university that it's actually bcj 2013 2016 tropical race for and i used that for developmental purpose to make sure that the industry will have to change their approach in research and in the mitigation process and so but this was not published or reported in the national forum until 2008 which are reported in the python society meeting in in honolulu next slide please next slide please so obviously there is a question of management of disease management and what do we have the first thing that comes to mind is a resistant variety any disease for that matter any plant pathologies or any partner would for that matter they would ask for a recent resistant variety if you have a problem like that and we have the conventional breeding program that has been going on in latin america i am very familiar with this because i said i work for chiquita brands and we developed varieties through philro that we donated later to fia that is that high yielding but very susceptible to but not acceptable in the market so it was not it did not enter the trade industry and of course at that time in 1990 i was still with the chiquita we were looking already in collaboration with the molecular biologist using gmo approach for black sega toca and unfortunately we did not have a very successful pursuit on that direction and of course it's still the process that many scientists are trying to pursue which is a legitimate pursuit however there is a breeding program in taiwan because taiwan was the first industry that was attacked by tr4 and that is the selection of a resistant variety next slide please against tr4 next slide please now the taiwan banana research institute was a very important institute to protect their industry their main problem before was the typhoon and the product so they have to plant every year and so they were the first one to develop or commercialize the in vitrumas propagation but at the same time it was an opportunity for selecting variants in the field because their approach is very unique you cannot do this approach in the laboratories you have to do that in the field where you have a population and you have a disease in the soil to serve as selection pressure and you use the you select that in the field next slide please and when once this is an opportunity next slide please next slide you need to wait because from the moment i click the bottom until you see it there's more time it takes a few seconds for your information yeah okay so this approach requires a population and they involved the farmers so it was a farmer's participatory selection where they supplied the seedlings in millions of seedlings in thousands of hectares of soil infested with the patogen okay the next slide will show you how how they do it okay so in the plant in the farm the the farmer selects or by worse in a severely infected plant and and the assumption here and i think this is the base on science is that in tissue culture the process of tissue culture mass propagation you are creating off types or variants and there could be a favorable variance and that favorable variant is a resistance resistance to a disease in this case for sardine wilt and that is selected in the in the field by way of survival or or death of the plants and any infected healthy plant the farmer will bring that to the tbri and they will verify it and they plant them again in screening having tested soil and selected lines are subjected to field verification for resistance yield agronomic traits etc now this approach is very is very unique because the population that is selected or the individual that is selected is already most likely agronomically or in terms of quality are similar to the from the parent plants if there is a variation very small next slide please now as a regional coordinator of biodiversity international for asia pacific taiwan banana research institute is a member of my network so i coordinated different countries in asia like china india the philippines etc and taiwan banana research institute is a member of our network and they shared these varieties as early as 2002 as 2002 and i was able to convince the tbri to share in good faith for global public goods for uh for testing in asia especially uh next slide please in the philippines we focus in the philippines because it is an area where as i told you there is an epidemic and so the first evaluation of gct cbs where in the philippines was in 2006 the first batches of gct cbs that i got next slide please the was gct cb 119 uh i evaluated these varieties together with the local varieties because i was concerned that uh what about if we have this epidemic what is what about the local varieties which are very important to to the local uh uh economy for farmers and well we found out that Lakatan and latondan uh are very susceptible kardaba which is the saba is very resistant together with kloy namua but what was surprising was gct cb 119 which was very resistant to tr4 unfortunately 119 is very tall variety late maturing and the number of hands were very small but it is very very sweet some companies try it but they cannot uh uh commercialize it because of the uh the agronomic um deficiencies next slide please so in 2008 i have again convinced tbr i to share other gct cbs and in that case so in that time we got 105 218 219 219 by the way is a selection that we made in the philippines uh the pram 109 and grand name so we did this evaluation again from 2008 to 2011 and out of this evaluation we identified 218 and 219 to be to have potential next slide please next slide please and from small trials we went into commercial trials with a company that is severely affected by the disease we evaluated the 218 and 219 compared to grand name not on small plots but we are talking of 11200 shillings which is about 5000 5 hectares and we did we ran that for several years and we we have seen that 218 219 is really very so resistant 219 218 is very it's not that resistant but it is compared to grand name it's very acceptable but the advantage of 218 it has a very good agronomic traits similar almost similar to to williams and grand name in terms of yield and quality next slide please so there was a series of experiments uh and from that stage and i'd like to point this out all of my activities here in asia i work with the industry and research institutions so it's was partnership and um so i i we evaluated semi-commercial with different companies lapanda small company like mauro dole that echo is a big company and the the result was phenomenal there i have been presenting these results in international fora but well there were some skeptics so don't you did not believe it but at least i'll my the industry believe though what they were seeing next slide please so in 2014 next next slide please in 2014 we have a very good demonstration that you see in the left slide february 21 2012 this farm was abandoned totally destroyed in so i took the picture in the left picture in 2017 but we rehabilitated that in 2018 of gctcb 2018 in 2014 so the industry was really i was really convinced that this is the way to go in the absence of any other variety because the industry was already kind of been in danger next slide please so i just would like to show you the stage stage of adoption by commercial companies next slide please the obvious step when they commercialize it to use it in commercial scale is to must produce 218 so each company had their industries of producing 218 for their rehabilitation and expansion programs this is not those are evidences of the success of 218 next slide please and this is a slide provided by the company and this they presented this in several meetings that we had in the Philippines and even i think tadeco presented that in Boston during the meeting in 2017 by 2017 tadeco had been using had replanted 1140 hectares that is not experiment that's already after a life situation from 2017 and now we are talking of 2022 imagine how many 218 they have already in 2018 they reported already almost 4 000 hectares so it is very well adapted or used by farmers in the Philippines next slide please and last recently because since two years ago when pandemic came i was i did not have the chance anymore to visit the wow but i'm monitoring what's happening and in august 2021 just last year there is this company 370 hectares and totally destroyed in 2015 and they rehabilitated it with ucl4 which is gcpc b218 next slide please and last week i asked the vice president of technical services of one of the biggest company by phone asked him what is now the status and he told me this is in this is actual it is safe to say that 218 is used in all rehabilitation programs and in most expansion plantings says that 218 saved the banana industry from destruction of tr4 next slide please so the industry has developed or has accepted this as a tool to manage tr4 in the philippines the the thing is that 218 is now selected or mass produced by each company and each company has a name already lapanda fruits they call it lfc 75 that they call it pdc 7 but at least they recognize that it is 218 dull is sf 120 dull is a standard fruit uniproti it's ucl4 even rahan you know rahan is selling a c4 commercializing it not only the philippines but worldwide they are promoting it c4 but it is uniproti cl4 it is gcpc b218 because the the the the guy who selected ucl4 is i know him by 12 because we call i he collaborated with me before next slide please our problem though however is that the small growers do not have this infrastructure for good quality seedlings so there are a lot of variations you know 218 when it's not properly selected and managed you can have a lot of variation so these small growers have inferior quality of 218 in other quick care and inputs and but the big companies they have good selection and they are very satisfied with 218 i know what a 218 is i just look at the plant i know what it is sometimes they hold it with other variety but actually it's 218 next slide please now 218 is also gcpc miss from tbr i had also helped other countries next slide please yes dr marina i i see that you still have 14 slides and and we are running out of time this one you you you just simply press it uh rapidly but the thing is it's in sumatra in indonesia they're using it since 2006 next slide please next slide please and the commercialization uh now this i that's was in indonesia i would like to talk a little bit maybe two minutes for musambik i visited musambik with dr altos uh in 2013 90 of the farm was tested already they had an effective biosecurity they don't know the disease etc they have financial issues next slide please and by 2015 they were about to abandon the plant and the plantation i recommended we recommended that they used to 18 because at that time we were using already in the philippines uh so we provided for testings in matanuska uh as early as 2016 uh next slide please but by the end of 2017 matanuska by 2017 they had planted 500 000 directly source from tbr i and early 2018 the company closed because of black out of operational money not because of formersana failed as some leds by mid 2018 yacaranda limited bought matanuska they rehabilitated it they used formersana so next slide please and this is the picture that i got from from yacaranda to prove that it's they have used these varieties the seedlings they use they got it from formersa from tbr i next slide please well i just would like to make this quotation from dr uh huang esi huang is the father of all these gct cbs the former director of tbr i he says the success of tbr i in selecting and commercializing resistant cabinets against pr4 demonstrates a noble and practical method of banana brim improvement program a feat that conventional breeding and gmo approach have not achieved in many years in spite of huge investment that is the word of dr huang whenever we invite him to talk during our meeting next slide please now tbr i is continuously improving their system and they have the latest improvement is 218 the formersana that was developed in 2002 in 2017 they have selected an improved 218 and they have this in their portfolio it's not yet available this is the their field of formersana formersana and tc number eight is the improved 218 and this is available uh for uh yeah next slide please it has characteristic of shorter high uh height uh fruit less susceptible to trips and maturities stain earlier harvest once configuration better happened one day faster so tbr i has continuously improved their system through their soma clonal uh selection their method next slide please next slide please and uh next slide please next slide i uh with uh this summary formersana is the most significant technology developed and available to manage the r4 epidemic and this is available to everyone who want to collaborate with them um and while waiting for a better variety we have produced by other breeding programs 218 is is a variety that could be useful elsewhere uh next next slide please the predictions of that uh you know uh this was a new scientist as early as 2003 they had predicted that bananas will die a natural death if we don't do breeding programs and that was the time that we were promoting GM or you know research uh and then in 2013 some people predicted that by 20 by in five years uh bananas will not be there anymore which is okay it had created uh interest of so many people and had created a lot of investments in in banana research uh but until they had that i believe that the the program of of uh approach of soma clonal selection in the tropics you cannot do that in in europe or anywhere else it must be done in the tropics where you produce it next slide please well i would like to say i would like to say that uh this uh i would say success story of 218 it's not a product of overnight uh simplified narrative like this it's a partnership that i put together engaging the industry research institutions not only in the philippines but uh the whole of asia i we have good partners in china in india and australia and other countries and including stalin bush university who helped us a lot and uh biodiversity i coordinated this it's not my work alone it is a uh a win-win good collaboration so that is the story of the one eight thank you dr marina thank you very much for the insightful information provided out of the almost an experience in asia it was really interesting now i'd like to give the floor to dr altos did join as a professor in tampathology in stalin bush university in south africa he is an authority in banana fusarium and has been working on the disease for more than 20 years now his research involves many aspects related to fusarium will including diagnostics plant resistance and integrated disease management his research group also focused on fungal genetics and genomics epidemiology and the isolation and identification of genes associated with disease resistance in plants professor bill join coordinates and african consortium dealing with uh fusarium tropical race four collaborates with many banana researchers globally has been invited as a keynote speaker at several scientific conferences and has published numerous scientific articles on banana fusarium will um prof professor bill join will present some of his research on formosana and on the cultivation of the summer clone in africa dr bill join please discuss yours thank you very much victor for the introduction i hope this is the the new version that i sent you this morning i believe it will be indeed right um i have listed the number of names here for actually talking about the performance of formosana in southern africa because most of us our work has been done in mosambique and that is done in collaboration with jacaranda uh banana company we're glad as tazan and suren surenson are the managers of of the setup over there so they have also provided me with quite a bit of information of what i will be presenting next slide please next slide right i think just to give a little bit of perspective of the importance of cavernish bananas in africa and i'm mentioning specifically this because formosana is a cavernish type it's not a cooking banana and cooking banana is the major type of banana grown in the continent uh cavernish makes up only about nine percent of all the bananas and it's grown mostly in the southern african region and then also on the east african coastline uh by some companies that is investing over there and then if you go up to sumalia uh sudan um ethiopia there is also quite a bit of of cavernish being grown and then obviously in west africa it's grown in cameroon ivory coast with some exports going into europe but it's it's a rather small group of it thank you you can go back no go back right um just to let me just try to clean up okay just to summarize briefly there's a number of strategies to improve banana for resistance to tr4 and james taylor's one time very nicely summarized it in saying that there are long-term strategies intermediate-term strategies and short-term strategies what i'm going to focus on is the short-term strategies and the somo-clonal variant uh for wasana mostly but one should also realize that there's another mutation breeding strategy which is called induced which is called induced metagenesis that can be done with chemical mutations or by physical mutations and we're not but discussed this at this meeting but i think it's a an important strategy that needs to be followed and the reason why we are excited about the mutation breeding is obviously the time involved it is a shorter strategy as the the other two um it also doesn't require that you need to know what are the genes that you need to target with genetic modification or or even gene editing and obviously working on a cavernous banana will give you a taste that is true to the typical export banana that we have and and the cavernous banana so there won't be any taste issues next slide please i think i'm going to skip the next two slides simply for time constraints i know that we are running a little bit out of time so this is just the the process of somo-clonal variation let's go to the next slide and this is for metagenesis so i'm going to skip this as well please go to the next slide right so basically the testing of formusana or gctcb218 that it's all what is also known in africa has started almost 20 years ago when we tested an earlier version of gctcb218 in in the subtropical banana growing areas of south africa where we've got a different strain of fusarium welt called subtropical race 4 and and since then obviously i have seen the development of somo-clone and seen how it's been improved and also planted in other countries and certainly this also led to the recommendation when there was a problem in most of it that we should test some of the somo-clones coming from taiwan next slide please right so just to give you an idea of the situation in most of it this is on the east coast of africa the only sites that had really been affected are two different plantations one was the matanushka original plantation and that was severely affected and then the jakaranda plantations that's on the luria river up in the north and but for the trials that we decided to do we thought of doing the tr4 resistance screening at matanushka because it was so severely contaminated and then in a clean field site to do some multicultural traits that we also wanted to evaluate of the different varieties and it was a comprehensive it was a big trial it consisted of 40 plants replicated five times so 200 plants of each somo-clone that we've actually tested and it was done over two years next slide please right so these are some of the somo-clones that gazes already mentioned gctcv 106 119 218 which is the formusana and then 247 and these were all identified by professor one as those ones that showed good resistance to tr4 up in uh taiwan and then we've also included dpm 25 which is a dwarf prophet mutant and this has been developed by mutagenesis gamma ray irradiation and then finally we also included the susceptible cavernous cultivar called nandi which is a local selection over there next slide right the the rating just very briefly was done on a rating scale of one to five um how we evaluated and compared the different somo-clones was to measure the disease under the area under the disease progress curve over two years that means we did a rating every month and then just see how the disease developed over time next slide please right um so on the right hand side in the top picture you can see the average disease rating that was in the first season of the plant crop and on the bottom you can see that the gctcv are actually doing much much better than the regular cavernous types the nandi as well as the dpm 25 um that showed much more disease development over there the bottom is just results of the first return um and while those bars look quite high for the gctcv this is all calculated according to the area under the disease progress curve so it does look much more than it is um but in the end the one can see that the gctcv as Gus mentioned earlier clearly performed best and that was followed by gctcv 218 or the formisana next slide please we also looked at the number of production trades that is the cycle time um the serosteum or the plant height as well as uh diameter the number of leaves and also some trades of the of the fruit that's produced afterwards next slide please so i'm just gonna highlight a few of these um the nandi as i said is a local cavernous cultivar and if you look on the left green column over there in the top for the plant crop you can see that the cavernous is no doubt a much faster grower than the summer clones and so this is something that we knew for for a long time for the first return we actually saw that the second cycle is much faster for the formisana but still not as fast as a typical or normal cavernous cultivar in terms of bunch weight um the gctcv 218 actually did very very well it produced the best bunch in the first season and the two second season it was also quite similar to the cavernous types um so the bunch size was very similar to that so it's basically simply a cycle time that made the the total yield per year uh slightly less than the regular cavernous bananas next slide please right so gus also mentioned that matanushka was destroyed by tr4 within four years it is probably the worst outbreak of tr4 that i've seen in any country um and i've seen it in many different countries at the moment 750 hectares of the former matanushka has been replanted by jakaranda company that's now owned the place at another 250 hectares is being planted near the luryo river so that's a little bit up the north um losses due to fusarium world range at the moment between five and 20 percent um we still try to analyze what's the reason for the variation but it could also be soil inoculum levels they're different they differ between the different spots where we reported this data um most of these plants are many things coming from tbri so it it's actually the plants in tissue culture that perform very very well um it's it's also interesting to know that the national and the international markets accepted the fruit very very well um so certainly there's there's no problem with market issue victor i can unfortunately not not see the last point down there but let's leave it and go to the next slide right so this is an interesting graph chip uh with me by the people from jakaranda and and you can see these crops crops at the top uh that showed quite a number of plants that got infected per hectare and then suddenly in week 12 10 12 14 of the next year um the incidents became much less and the jakaranda stuff really believes that this is due to the treatment of the soil with compost and also compost um mixed with a number of beneficial microbes it's either im effective microbes that they incorporated there or tricodermas that they incorporated that so it is quite important to support the formusana and not think that it's standalone um to actually solve your problem next slide so in conclusion formusana is now fully replaced susceptible to having these bananas in the tr4 affected fields in most of it but it's not being planted yet in any of the non-infested fields uh on the continent um commercially i know there are trials going on the horticultural traits and food taste of formusana is is good um actually the people from jakaranda also shared to me that it fixed better prices than normal bananas on some markets the cultivation of it as i said just now needs to be supported by integrated disease management programs so it's not a standalone and finally it is not an immune plant one should remember that um but for now that is the only thing if you have physiarine tr4 in your fields there's absolutely nothing else available for you and it's doing pretty well and one can continue forming banana still economically if you plant this final slide next slide right thank you very much this is the end of my talk i think everyone that's involved in the work in africa on formusana is uh participating in this webinar so you can ask questions to any one of us if there's an opportunity yes thank you very much doctor we join highly appreciated very interesting information now um i am mindful of the time and then we don't have much time in fact if we follow the agenda only three minutes maybe we can allocate 10 minutes now for a qa session questions and answers and if we have time we can of course continue replying questions after we finish the the presentation of the last panelist i would like to close here by saying that of course we will have more opportunities to formulate more questions you know the webinars but also please do not hesitate if you have questions to send them to both panelists or the webinar from secretariat and we will be happy to include that in the report and of course address those questions so i would like to get the floor now to my colleague in the webinar from secretariat mateus lima who collected some questions we decided to rescue two or three questions each um and then leave the rest the other questions for another occasion mateus you have the screen thank you thank you very much victor uh one question that that was uh repeated a lot of time is regarding the market acceptance regarding the flavor and texture of formosana so i would like to ask dr molina and autus as well if uh is how is the market acceptance there was also interest regarding the stability of the summit one so these two these two questions in one to be brief please thank you here's the termolina two minutes thank you yes uh there's no there's no problem uh that it is accepted by the market the fact that more than 10 000 hectares are already sold by commercial companies in different markets in asia so it's accepted there is a problem in china uh because um the way one so who are what are uh shipped to china are were mostly produced by small growers which are um don't have the capability to produce good quality plants it's not because of the of the variety because the variety the formosana is good in fact it is a little bit sweeter than the regular carbon it's accepted no problem mateus do you have the question please go ahead thank you yes uh other question was regarding the stability of the soma clone in the field if the soma clone behave how is the behavior of the stability of the soma clone if you can also comment very brief or autus autus will answer or i will yeah i can i commotion and the Philippines is uh relatively stable there's not there is however an observation that we have the observe uh quite some time ago that the gctcb's in general are uh floaters they float and therefore if they are not managed properly in terms of drainage and et cetera uh the the there is a decline in yield but with good management that's that should not be a problem in terms of variability going back there is uh an observed variation uh variability or variance especially when they do uh a lot of tissue culture and they don't know how to select the mother plants and that is true to small growers but in terms of stability of resistance it is uh it is very stable okay dr. Molina thank you very much um for the information i just opened the microphone of our colleague uh working with the supreme general office in paramah the mesoamerica office ester is your microphone working now ester per alta can you please check if you're making sure absolutely please go ahead seria bueno que uh los ponentes pudieran comentar al respecto y de igual manera doctor kema uh perhaps or um yeah okay quickly then translate question uh fictor because it's foundation in the work okay then maybe we should have informed interpretation i would like then to ask ester again to formulate the question and please um interpreters you need to switch you need to go to the english channel and and provide a simultaneous interpretation from hispanic into english so uh please go to the english channel victor yeah victor if i may i may answer the la pregunta de ester i think i think it will be i think it will be good if doctor kema replies now okay go ahead thank you because my interpretation is that what are the protocols in terms of uh of biological control etc in managing formosana i suppose so um maybe doctor kema can answer it ester it was about formosana yes okay then then sorry yes formosana and in general the resistance or tolerant the summer clones or clones in general okay so then formosana please for mr molina uh but the the the the answer of balverde about atomic energy for the new clones that is important the opinion of different person which are a participant participant in this webinar thank you ester so doctor molina please go ahead with formosana we go with an atomic energy with our colleagues from if i understood well the question of ester it's about the what she was asking whether there are already there are standard or protocol how to manage formosana with the other treatments like bio biological organisms and and and farming practices uh this question is not easy to answer inside right now because i i think autos will agree with me that the most of these types of activities around a variety is developed more by the companies the and every company has different types of production system and each company developed their own so there are ester there are protocols already developed by these companies it's just a matter of of knowing that they are they are good researchers too thank you doctor kim if he wants to reply of course yes or mr or mr soresen well i mean it's sorry here i am yeah but as uh as gus said you know i i cannot comment on the management of t4 and formosana we are just not active in that region so i think i think there was a second part of the questions which might be repeated about mutation breeding i'm my spanish is not very good yes maybe okay so ester what was the question ester in spanish yeah there are questions about the possibilities of the use of atomic energy for the obtaining of resistant or tolerant varieties if they have any foundation on that or some results would be useful for the audience do you need my translation hurt yes please yeah he is asking whether uh you have any knowledge on whether atomic energy can be useful to obtain to obtain a new resistant varieties uh yeah well i'm not sure i mean um if you look at what's being presented now and for instance the word that will be presented by dr piatovran meristem i believe that the technology that's being used in these companies has already shown that yeah we can select resistant material and i have not seen that yet from the program from jenna in in austria so but of course as you understand from our presentation we are not objecting to mutation breeding don't take me wrong but of course mutation breeding is not diversifying the crop as it should be i mean that's what we do is classical breeding right and and as we've shown also in our presentation we'd rather not focus just on tr4 because maxi getoka is at least equal and in many countries a way more important problem than fusarium wilt and so we believe that diversifying the crop is eventually really necessary with the focus on these major fungal diseases so i hope this answers the question asked you're you're muted yeah yes thank you so much and there are many people that are questioning that yeah sure okay thanks can i add to that please yeah go ahead from a technical point of view i think uh uh mutation breeding in general is a very very nice tool very good tool that can be used and has been used in many cases in other crops to develop resistant geobus the problem with the triploid sterile cavendish however is that most mutation occurrences result in let's say not in a dominant phenotype so it usually results in a resistant phenotype so if you don't have the means to cross that back and select for the correct uh homozygous dominant effect um the you know mutation breeding it's not that effective you are able to combine the two cross selection and mutation breeding that would be the most efficient breeding method in my view from a technical point of view okay so question to dr sorensen if i may uh i'm a pet dr molina i i'm i'm really sorry but i have some technical issues and and we are uh a bit um we're not really good in with the agenda can you please hold on until the end of the webinar if we have time we will continue with the questions and answers would that be possible dr molina i am i am ready to hit the bench so i'm signing off thank you dr molina um i'm sorry we have ten minutes late uh is that that's the only reason why and then please i have an issue with interpretation to keep on receiving messages interpretation in spanish is not working we need maybe to change again the interpreter because the sound comes and goes meaning we have more than 500 participants most of them speak in spanish we we really appreciate if interpreters can maybe speak closer to the microphone or fix this a technical issue please confirm via website that this is possible thank you okay dr molina i feel about uh interrupting you please go ahead with that question really fast and then we will continue it was just a technical question to dr sorensen does he consider this mclonal selection variant selection of the child of the taiwanese uh breeders they call them they don't breed it's it's not the traditional crossing a does he consider that as a mutation breeding uh actually not uh as you say correctly we call it soma clonal variation which means that uh stable genetic change has not been introduced but probably some type of epigenetic modification has been uh achieved in these particular clothes now and so my question to you was uh in in the course of the years has there been attempts to try to identify what actually happens on the genomic level in these soma clons no none maybe that you should be the work that you should be doing uh looking at uh you step back with the for mozana you should look at look at that that but you see this tissue culture is a mutation is a mutagen also in in some cases you do achieve stable genetic differences in soma clons but most cases these are epigenetic modifications which turn out to have difficulties in stability the reason i'm pushing this is that uh we are pushing this as an approach especially for the big companies where they can they're using uh tissue culture in mass and they are observing a lot of off-type sometimes and that off-type is of course these are mutation classes and but they have the ability to uh collect or to select from millions of of of our population and that is which is an element of any breeding program you need population right that's correct but i would be extremely interesting to see if we can elucidate what really happened in the form of soma genotype on a genomic level work on it please that is very important very very important now for stability also absolutely good so thank you very much we will have more opportunities to continue this discussion because i am sure that we will touch base again and organize other women as precisely on this topic so now i think it's respectful if we continue with the agenda and continue with the other panelists so thank you very much for the panelists of the first two blocks and and the questions formulated again we will have a chances to address all those questions in the report with the panelists please um um be with us until the end of the of the webinar because maybe we will have time to formulate those questions before we finish so um now i would like to continue with this last block on conventional breeding and resistant biographies to tf4 for that i would like to give the floor in the first place to dr federic battery he's a well-known banana breeder at sirat he holds a phd in plant breeding and has spent at least half of his life working with bananas he currently works in the agap institute genetic improvement and adaptation of the terrarium and tropical plants in the gava team gba team uh on banana genetics and breeding uh his main areas of work are focused on genetic resources breeding strategies biotechnologies and field selection of musassia with experience in france guadalupe and brazil rebedic battery has carved his uh for himself as a unique career and um thanks to his readiness for taking risks and is burning the roads less trouble in the phd opinion so dr battery please you have the floor presenting the vinaigrette is developed by sirat with the systems on tf4 the screen is yours thank you very much for this this introduction can you put my presentation on the screen please can you see it it's already there no i don't see it well anyway i have my do you like to share your screen would you please i can share i can try i can try to share my screen yes if you have it ready uh maybe it will be here for you so i'm going to stop my no but i prefer that you put on your set for yourself my presentation on the screen i was not sharing i was not sharing the screen you are right but then is the perfect opportunity for you to share it please don't directly i can you have the button available what sorry you want my you want that i share my own presentation on my computer if you want to do it i think i'm gonna be more comfortable because i have a whole computer which is not running very well so much more better if you can do it you are supposed to be watching very much your slide in the screen now please no no yes i see it thank you very much so thank you very much for inviting us when i tell us it's a sirat to give a presentation about our activities in banana breeding next slide please next do you have thank you very much sorry i just would like to to remember that there are some challenge around the banana production around the world the major the major challenge for banana production at least for her is environmental constraints clearly including present and emerging based on disease but i think that in the future climate change and notably access to water will be a major challenge for most producers we are in supply chain expectation the supply chains expectation we are a chain of actors in the in production of banana and all people have not necessarily all the same vision of what they are waiting for this banana production clearly producer want productivity and high income the same time consumer demands is no we are assist we are assisting to evolution of the consumer demand and the requirement of consumer is much more towards fruit quality but we can see the way the ways of organic production and unfortunately for us its remains is the one banana the best banana for the lower price as possible so we can see already that there is some contradictory aspect is the supply chains now regarding what are the the objectives of banana breeding if we consider the major challenge for sustainable production systems clearly as already underlined and told by uh and also we agree with them and it's clearly to introduce genetic diversity in the current process systems and truly genetic diversity is desert bananas and cooking bananas i just would like to remember here that about 85 percent of the world production of bananas today in terms of variety relies on no more six to six sorry six to seven sexual initial sexual events in just one cross in just one segregating population we have much more genetic diversity in one cross that the current cultivate genetic diversity of banana around the world around the world today i think it's extremely important to remember that objective for desert bananas as for export markets as for local markets as domestic markets clearly is relying on free age enemy constitution and when we consider the markets of india or brazil but even australia with ladyfinger domestic markets can be dominated by some aspect in some region by a a b uh varieties too so it's extremely important and clearly for desert bananas resistant to main disease is the most uh important as emphasized by kert we were confusarios but also on black leaf streak and yellow cigar when i start my scientific life on banana but we can neglect fruit quality and productivity cooking bananas is a difficulty to access to water we clearly uh most orient our choice on robustness dryness tolerance but also if possible tolerance to pest and disease we will name my thoughts black cigar to kato and clearly fissiles fissiles but fruit quality in particular regarding the cooking ability of this sorry its food quality next slide next thank you very much so uh genetic improvement in banana even sirat must be considered as in a holistic approach including uh a rank of various activities scientific activities and development activities we have to consider upstream research in the area of genomic and genetics but also has underlined by enker sorenson the main constraints in banana breeding is probably the difficulty to get seeds good seeds for selecting in good condition good varieties i will come back on this issue later uh the second point after upstream research we are with the proper activities of breeding and selection of progenies but at that at that uh state the work is not concluded is not finished and we have to develop in given some agro systems uh given agro systems there's new varieties and each new variety need and will need to develop its own this its proper agro system and finally uh finally uh probably in close partnership with uh suppliers and markets we have to make fine tuning uh in terms of adaptation of our variety here i put a slice of one of our most advanced varieties on the european market point to the its name is it's a new hybrid next slide next victor thank you very much banana detective implemented program upstream genetic research upstream genomics and genetic research clearly to perform better our activities of breeding we need to acquire many knowledge on various aspects of the banana complex first of all species complex knowledge of the species complex the diversity of this complex the organization and the domestication process because we will use this knowledge to optimize our own breeding strategy and clearly the choice of the parents to make breeding and second aspect very important in banana because banana is vegetatively vegetatively propagated and is carrying a lot of structural we would say aberration most of the cultivated varieties are very structural variation in the genome bosaic genome structure and we know that all these accidents have an impact on recombination and chromosome distribution in the gametes of banana so we are to take into account this knowledge to perform better the choice of our parents and the selection the third point very important is the genetic basis and transmission of traits there it's extremely easy to make genetic segregating population with whites but when we want to work with cultivated varieties as said by Anker if I remember well it's extremely difficult and the production of segregating population is a difficult task not in whites but in cultivated I will come back later on this issue next slide so in breeding we defend and since the beginning an approach relying on deep rates clouds cultivated deep points clouds stipulating that they are the origins of the triplet variations and we need a better knowledge about the situation of these deployed clouds and why what can we say there is no absolutely no deployed clouds today in a cultivated so why the cultivated clothes which are not an hybrid hybrid of various source of different white types on the left you can see green means in this slide for the clone video greens means with acumenata bonxi origin violet or red means musa acumenata zebrina origin and we can see that in the gluoclone originated from I remember Philippine the composition of in this clone is more of 50% of the genome composition is coming from musa acumenata bonxi at the opposite in the clone manung and manung is important but I will come later about this clone manung is a resistant clone to terrifor raster one and terrifor so manung is interesting from the breeding post of you and this is clone manung we can see that the formula genomic formula of this clone is much more equilibrated we can find bonxi origin but also zebrina and malacansis origin too so the mosaic observe a subject at present day cultivars originate from two up to five white ancestors evolving in such case several generations of mediatic combination next I would like to share with you a very nice example about the studies of domestication and how we can use these elements to carry out to to perform better sorry to perform better our activities in banana breeding here is an example of the origin of a Cavendish and Gros-Michel variety as pomeprata varieties what is amazing is that in both case if we make hypothesis about the formation of twin gametes at the origin of the triplet varieties both groups so one shui the second ad shares the same charry origin in their generals in one case it is an acuminata malacansis which led to the formation of in in cross sorry in cross with charry gametes which led to Cavendish and Gros-Michel and clones of the same composition more or less the same composition in free a and if we replace a kai genome by the balbisana genome the same charry with twin gametes led to pomeprata natural varieties so this knowledge we will use it to recreate starting from charry or starting from other crops including resistance to disease various diseases we include this knowledge we will use this knowledge to recreate new varieties from deep red genus next so the third point that i talk about is clearly the search of new genes involved in phenotypic traits and recently we published a paper on the detection of critters for food quality related to traits in the deep red population where we cross cultivated varieties in that case it was Pisan Madu by the clone Gallet sorry which is which are sufficient distant enough to reveal polymorphisms a identification of QTL and so on 26 major QTL have been identified in the genome and clearly we will use this knowledge to make the search of genes involved in the quality of the fruits next slide next slide know the challenge is how to use all this knowledge to perform good reading and so i will go back in the next slide on this issue but i just would like to emphasize that recently we published the book of Gert Kemmer and and a chapter of banana breeding its name is making banana breeding more effective because the difficulty in banana breeding to which is easy to get seeds is easy to get good seeds and good variety coming from good crops is much more difficult so in this chapter all people will find answer as well to to the questions that they can have next next slide please clearly to perform a variety to obtain varieties resistant to disease is better to start with genplace which is resistant to this disease and one of the most important clones for us has to be to use this accession IDN 110 which is deployed coming from indonesia and these clones have a very interesting features is resistant to yellow to get the back the yellow to get the cab like this disease name at odds and we found more recently that is resistant to s1 and tf in cultivate conditions so it shows that we use these clones to perform improvement in bananas next slide please the principle of our sorry of our shame in banana breeding is has we still is reconstructive breeding because we we try to mimic we try to mimic what made the nature in the past trying to incorporate knowledge sources of resistance and trying to to come back to new varieties obtained by cross but very close to the present and current varieties but at the same time different because we want to include resistance to disease so the first step is a step the selection of deeply germplacin within our our varieties or even in white types we can so choose in abbey clones or even in white bb clones to perform crosses and a very important step in our strategy as is to as we don't manage we don't know how to master the production on two egg gametes in banana we decide to enter a process of systematically making chromosome doubling to get a copy a tetrapleid copy of each deployed clone and we use this tetrapleid copy in back close with the other deployed close to obtain three triploid acuminata or ab if we cross an abb by an a or even we can obtain by this strategy ab is crossing tetrapleid a with balbisiana and even abbs we got more recently crossing abb by bb access and in fact today i think that we have been able to cover also the range of this genomic new genetic structure is important for us because using this approach we think that we can reach every system of production for intensive agro systems but also for local system where consideration such as access to water rusticity are more important i when i'm telling about that i'm thinking in terms of i'm thinking in ui groups abbi groups but in fact in this approach the main challenge for us is to identify the right combination the right combination between two parents in other terms the right specific company ability between two parents next thanks to the support of arheningen about resistance to terefa therefore we were in the process of selecting varieties in guadaloupe against yellow city atoka first and black leaf street disease in second and thanks to yetrema we had the opportunity to screen in our in a controlled condition in arheningen our elite hybrids but also deep rage and blasts against the rest of one anti-affold controlled conditions and clearly we have been satisfied to identify some varieties really some of them resistant of a completely immune in the case of this selection x 17 completely immune to terefa in controlled conditions but we also select a new hybrids in this controlled condition and we will see that no they are being able being evaluated in australia in northern territories against terefa in few conditions so we have been able to first identify new hybrids these are hybrids and of free a constitution and tomorrow of a a big constitution and we already have two but i hope in the future much more using parents resistant to terefa the selection process now for us is to select the best variety considering black leaf street disease resistance against atoka it's less important today that also productivity quite fluid quality and so on when we make a cross between the wild malbiziana accessions pollinated by a clone such idn 110 tetraploid in one cross we can produce more than 100 120 seeds in one pollination we already have too much material for the place we are in the field to make efficient selection that means that we are really have to search to work about the best way to get large progenies which can lead to interesting segregating varieties in the in the selection population and for selection interesting varieties in this segregation population so next slide please yes that's exactly i see that you still have four slides i mindful of the time i would appreciate if we can allow some time for the last panelist also so okay just to say so that our varieties are currently in australia and we confirm in us with the trials made in australia the comportment in identifying controlled conditions at least about three hybrids they are here 924 931 and 938 i just would like to remember that we they perform in first club and the first ratoon two without any centers i just would like to emphasize that also but these are not only resistant to terry for russia one but also to black history disease next we have developed a system and a partnership to evaluate our varieties not only in fresh indies but also with a couple and of partner according to their interest in our own interest too and namely all of the hybrids as much as possible we send our hybrids in the recent in australia to verify the comportment of our hybrids regarding terry for but also the comportment of the consumers regarding these new varieties in particular if we develop these varieties uh in organic systems black history disease that is not present in australia but the yellow sea caterpillar is still present if tomorrow we can stop with any treatment between for our point of view very nice next slide so just uh i would like to remember here that uh on this side seared large and uninitiated world museum alliance where the objective is to show research of banana producer on the platform to take a care catfusion on the other main disease clearly starting from our current activities testing new banana varieties hybrids implementing at the international testing network but we would like to reinforce our breathing capacities to produce much more hybrids in the future regarding different objectives and these activities of these activities of reading support about option research for the application after in reading for any contact please contact donnie leuier joncari at syrah next line i thank you for your attention thank you very much thank you very much dr. bachli i'd appreciate it very appreciated very insightful information those who need uh english now you need to switch in case you're in the off channel you need to go through the to the english channel uh very two parts. First, what we have done so far and second, what we are doing for the future. Next. Well, FIA is a private lucrative scenario organization. We spend our own funds for our financing. And to finance the program, we spoke for many years about international support, but that's been going on for a long time. And from there, we have worked with a lot of private companies. Now, to specifically develop various Cavendish varieties, resistant to RT-R4, what we call Musa Breeding Company, which is made up of Agroamerica from Guatemala, by Dole, PSEC, the international company, and by Makay's Banara Marketing from Australia. This company, or this commercial company, is made up of FIA, obviously FIA is a member. And it is made up of a board of directors and a technical committee. All the partners are represented in the board of directors and the technical committee. And obviously, as they are commercial partners, with a lot of experience in the banana business, and in the research, each one provides a wide range of skills, experience, and knowledge. Next. I want to mention that when this consortium or this commercial company began, all the big companies and some mediums were invited to participate. And only these three companies showed interest in participating. A brief story of the improvement of genetics, the improvement of genetics, here it began in 1959, it was about 60 years ago. To develop hybrid varieties of Grossmichel resistant to RASA-1, which was the Fusarium RASA that ended with Grossmichel at that time. The program began, well, first with a collection that was made in the Southeast Asia, where about a thousand varieties of different types of bananas were brought to their genetic studies. And with that, they developed diploids to be used later in the genetic improvement of banana types, like Grossmichel at that time. Fortunately, when it was in that process, the Cavendish was discovered, which was resistant to RASA-1, but it was very susceptible to Cigatoca. And the program changed a little bit of emphasis and it changed its goal of working with Fusarium resistance to work with resistance, with resistant diploid to Cigatoca-Negra. The emphasis was on the development of hybrid varieties with resistant to Cigatoca-Negra in Cavendish. Until 1984, when Chiquita, who started this program in the 1950s, decided to finish the research in banana and transferred the program to FIA with certain funds from the private sector of Honduran, from the government of Honduras, from Chiquita and from the government of the United States. And that's how FIA was created as a private company. However, as the nature of FIA had changed, or improved genetically, the international donors demanded that local markets be improved, but not for exportation. They said that exportation should be paid for commercial companies and not for international cooperation. So that's how it worked for many years until 2003, where we retook a new genetic improvement program with Chiquita, but that was to produce special bananas. Chiquita was very worried that there was only a clon of bananas in the market and that there could be a catastrophe at any time. That program worked for 10 years and they wanted a banana that was totally different from Cavendish. And in that period, about eight hybrid bananas were developed, of which Chiquita has patented two. You can see the patents that are published on the internet. One is called Chiquita Banana CQB 114 and the other is 115, 116. And you can see the genealogy, the properties and everything else. These are small bananas, they are not as big as Cavendish, they are very productive, they are resistant to Sega Toca, they are resistant to Fusarium 1, we have not evaluated them for Fusarium 4, at that time we didn't know how to do it. They had very good taste and the few tests Chiquita did at that time had very good market acceptance, especially in Europe. However, after the company suffered changes and they sold it twice, I think, and that is in oblivion or storage. Then from 2016, we started with this consortium that is five years old and these are the results that I am going to show you a little later with these three companies from Agroamerica, Guatemala, Makais de Honduras and Dora Internacional. Well, our development strategy has not changed over the years. Obviously, we have other technologies to do the same, but in general, the first thing that the program did was the development of improved deployments to then cross them with mother's tetraploids. The development of mother's tetraploids from Cavendish was not easy, but we managed to do it in the last few years and that is what we are using now. When crossing improved deployments with mother's tetraploids like Cavendish, we get triploids that then go to agronomic evaluation, then go to first agronomic evaluation here in our farms in Honduras and once two or three cycles of production pass, we go to evaluation with our partners and evaluation for TR-4 resistance. After commercialization and finally the hybrids will be patented, which are properties of the market. Next. Well, as a basis for the program, there are many studies on materials that are resistant to RASA-4, RASA-1, SEGA-TOKA and here I have chosen this as an example to show you part of the foundation of what we do. And you can see there, there are materials of several parts, there are the GZTBs, there are two or three of them, and you can see the materials of tetraploids, tetraploids mainly of FIA, except for the FIA-25, which are resistant to RASA-4 and also some diploids that you can see in that graph, which have been proven to be resistant to RASA-1 and RASA-4. This study was done in Australia. There are several studies of these that you can find, to show you how the foundation, the basis of what we are doing. Next. Well then, what we have developed so far and its different resistances, here I have put 10, there are others out there, but I am going to put the 10 most important that are the, there are postman bananas, there are cooking bananas, there are postman bananas like Gros Michel and there are banana postman bananas like Pratavana, two bananas, another banana postman like Gros Michel, a cooking banana like FIA-25 and a postman banana like FIA-26. Now, most of these materials are resistant to SIGATOCA, they are resistant, tolerant and moderately resistant. They are resistant to RASA-1, with the option of FIA-26 that we have practically already eliminated, even though it is a banana with excellent flavor, excellent RACIMO and excellent postman properties but it cannot be planted in places where there has been RASA-1 because it is susceptible. And we have in RASA-4, what we know so far, is that FIA-1, 2 and 3 are resistant, FIA-17 is susceptible, FIA-18 is resistant and something very interesting are the two bananas that we have, the 20-21. It is said a lot that RASA-4 can be a food security problem. Genetically, it is possible that both FIA-20 and FIA-21 are resistant to RASA-4 and we have seen several studies carried out in different parts of the world that say so, that both 20 and 21 are resistant to RASA-4. In my opinion, we need to do a little more detailed and more scientific research to get to that conclusion. But I think in Latin America and especially in Colombia which is a great banana consumer, if they already have FIA-20 and 21, I think the best thing that they could do immediately is to take these two materials to infected places and observe them. These materials have been in Colombia for many years. Well, we have FIA-23 which is resistant to RASA-1 and we do not know if it is resistant to RASA-4. It has not yet returned to us. The FIA-25 is practically immune to SIGATOCA, RASA-1 and RASA-4. Dr. Molina mentioned it. It is a cooking banana that does not have a good taste. But it can produce more than 80 tons per hectare and it is a large source of carbohydrates. We know that in several African countries they are using it for the process or for cooking, not for fresh fruit. Well, that is what we have developed so far. The next one. Now all these materials are available in the bank of Hermoplasma, in many places you can get them. Well, then for the future, the program began with the development of malice cavendish, tetraploids. This plant that you see there is a 100% tetraploid cavendish, which is quite a lot of work to do. But we have already developed several, as you can see here. Here they have photos of five and the previous one is six. We have several tetraploids. Some of these are 100% cavendish. We have others that are 50% cavendish and 50% gross michel. We really like the taste of gross michel. Many people say that gross michel has a better taste than cavendish. People get used to cavendish and probably think that cavendish is better. But all this matter of tastes, of marketing and getting used to people. Next. Well, here you can see a typical trace of a mother tetraploid cavendish. The bananas are cavendish, they know cavendish, the plant is cavendish. They have the same susceptibility, obviously, to cigatoches as well. The same port, that is 100% cavendish. Next. Here we have a triploid hybrid of a already selected plant. As you can see, this is our farm. The plant is free of cigatoch. We don't use cigatoch control. The plant is not very tall. The resin that appears there, obviously, is not exactly the potential of that plant. Because, as we only have one at the beginning, it is not made of sige. So you can see that there are about 10 plants there. Later, the corns are removed, they seed individually and a second test is done in our facilities, before sending them to our partners. They come, look, choose, and do their tests on their own farm. So far, what we have noticed is that the vast majority, I don't want to say 80%, 90%, but the vast majority of the hybrids that we have produced, using these strategies, are resistant to black cigatoch, which would reduce the production costs a lot. You saw that in Costa Rica, I think they mentioned that 32% of the production costs of cigatoch control is more than $1,500 or $2,000 a year per hectare. Obviously, it will also facilitate these new hybrids, the production of organic bananas, not transemic ones. So far, in these five or six years that we have been working on, we have developed 38 hybrids, with the strategy mentioned before. Some hybrids are with the mothers, Cavendish, others with the mothers that are crossed with the Michel. Of the 38 that were sent for evolution, they have evolved to now, preliminarily, 16. And of those 16, six have been highly resistant, two resistant, two susceptible, three highly susceptible, and three that are needed to confirm. Obviously, this work has been done in South Africa, and we have problems with the delivery of viable plants, because once they arrive in South Africa, they have to be reproduced in the laboratory, and it is a process that takes almost a year. We are now about to receive, in the next few months, the evolution of other hybrids that have been sent before. Additionally, South Africa has also been sent to Australia, where quarantine has already come out. There are several hybrids that are being sent to commercial farms, and I believe that in this first trimester of the year, they will be sent to contaminated soils in the territories of the North of Australia to make the resistance to the last four in the field. That will be the fire test for our hybrids. Here you can see photos of three hybrids improved by Cabendish. We have noticed that after the second trimester, they will be sent to our station, and they will be sent to commercial farms. They will improve the size of their fingers and the size of the hybrids. Obviously, because of the management that they give them for their practice of processing, they will be sent to commercial farms. Here we can see the type of finger that is produced. They are not exactly the same as Cabendish. They are very similar. Obviously, before we select something, we will try to make sure that they have a good taste, because we know that the taste has been developed. It is a very important characteristic for the consumer. The same can be said for the post-possession characteristics. Here you can see some of the hybrids. They have a very beautiful color. They are different sometimes in their shape, in their curvature, but they are important that they are all impeccable. Here we have a double finger that was made in a double finger in Guatemala and it is in process in Australia. Within the possibilities of development of musassia that we have in Fia, we already have mothers of various types of triploids to develop triploids of a wide variety of different musassias. For example, Cabendish, which is what we are working on more now. We can also work to revive a Gros Michel that has images of Gros Michel less than Cabendish. In bananas, type of apple, type of apple, ladyfinger, something that no one is doing or that is heard very little is to work in silver or improved. As I mentioned, we have already produced two. These two are very possible to resist. The two have diploids with resistance to the four. It is possible that the two are resistant but we have to confirm in the field. They are bananas that are already produced on a large commercial scale in several parts including Honduras and I know in the Dominican Republic even though there are other countries. We also developed a cooking banana type 25 and we have one that we have recently developed that has a high content beta-carotene that at this moment we are doing tests with one of the companies of the consortium to see what market potential it can have. Next. Well, this concludes my presentation. Obviously, here in FIDE we are very grateful to Case Marana Marketing de Australia, Agroamerica de Guatemala and Adol for the financing of the program. This is not a job of a person nor of a company but of a team and we have a technical committee that is made up of Dr. Juan Fernando Aguilar de FIA, Dr. Victor González de FIA, Dr. Marlos López de FIA, Dr. Roberto Yong de Dhol and Dr. Patricio Gutiérrez de Dhol we have Dr. Bob Williams of McCase, Cameron McCase of McCase, Franz Willemaker who is presenting Agroamerica and the engineer of this Falcon of Agroamerica. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much Don Adolfo as always a very interesting presentation. We have reached the end of the webinar we had foreseen that perhaps there would be a small session of questions and answers I will give the word to our expert working in the Panamá to promote some questions as I said before the questions will be managed we will try to answer them because of the electronic corridor with each of the people who formulated them and then we have the conclusions from the agricultural official in the Panamá office. Without further ado I would like to ask you before giving you the word if we can count imagine that there will be no problem please if you have any problem inform me through the chat and I give you the word I think you have the microphone working forward. Thank you Victor well the opinions that are very favorable about these presentations and I think within some of the things that were not answered or are asking now is the behavior or the results the last results of the evaluation or behavior of the hybrids both of the city and of the FIA although Dr. Adolfo just talked about that and of the programs that have been talked about here including the crops about their evaluation in countries where there is the disease it would be very useful that in that sense they told us how long it is calculated to conclude the behavior evaluations and to be able to have in how long to have different hybrids different clones and also please if these clones have been evaluated for other diseases in particular for the bonshit thank you very much Dr. Feder and Dr. Adolfo and if any of the other speakers want to thank you very much we will start to at least to our our valetiers are currently evaluated in various systems with partnerships with different partners around the world the most advanced partnership concerning field evaluation is clearly with Australia and is not concerning only a rassa1 or rassa3 is addressing also the question as said of yellow C get a cap And clearly, when we propose new varieties, we want to go out from the Cavendish system. Clearly, we are thinking about new production systems, mainly based on natural resistance of the hybrids. It's difficult to select hybrids for exportation because the constraints around post-arvest qualities are very important, very hard. At the same time, there is so much opportunities, and I think that Adolfo Martinez, in accord with me, there are so much opportunities for local markets who are the constraints of exportation post-arvest. So as post-arvest conditions are less difficult, and I really think that in the future, regarding these new varieties, we will assist to the diffusion of these new varieties. Really, worldwide, maybe not immediately, but in the future, much and more varieties will be developed. Yes, I think it's very important what Frederick just said. You have to remember that only 10% of the veranda market is for export. The only 80% is for domestic consumption. And then we cannot forget that. The evaluation of TR4 in Australia, if you include the quarantine that they have, it's a long process. It can take three to four years. And then when you do the evaluation, you have to do at least two or three cycles, especially if you're going to go to an intentionally contaminated field. We have noticed that intentional contaminated fields sometimes they have very high levels of fusarium that are not sustainable in the soil. And we have noticed some of our previous hybrids that they are much better in the second cycle than in the first one. And that is probably because the population of the fusarium has decreased naturally because the soil cannot sustain such high levels of inoculum. So you have to be careful with that. But it takes at least two cycles in the field plus whatever restrictions you have in the country for quarantine and multiplication. So you're talking about three to four years. There were other questions? I think we have many. I see a question here about bricks and some of our new hybrids have a higher bricks than Cavendish. Cavendish is 22, 23. We have gone up to 26. But also you have to know that actually the flavor buds of what they favor is the ratio of bricks and acidity. So you have to have the right proportion of both. So you have to look at both bricks and acidity. Thank you very much. Again, there are many questions that are supposed to be addressed, but we will do it after the webinar. Thank you very much. Victor, please, look at the chat the references of the results that have been managed and other experiences in Mozambique. Because there were many questions about that. And there you can have information. Thank you. Okay. I'm going to copy it again here so that everyone can see it. Here it is. This is the link that is meant to be. Victor, another question that I see today is about the cycle of the production of the bricks. We have a couple of the new bricks that are very precocious and produce one and up to two months before Cavendish. The others are similar. Obviously, if you can produce in one or two months less, its profitability will increase, its control of diseases will decrease, its cost, and production will be faster. We have that additional advantage with a couple of bricks too. It's very interesting. We will continue this discussion. I'm a little pending about the time because we also have the participants and panelists. We have the simultaneous interpretation service, which is already at the limit of their working time with us. I wanted to give the floor to the director of agriculture, Raisa Jauger. We say goodbye until tomorrow. As I said, we have some very interesting panelists and a very interesting session tomorrow. Please continue with us because we will make a summary of everything we have discussed in the last two days. Thank you. Thank you very much, Victor. I've made a brief summary of the day today. Thank you to the panelists for the excellent presentations and also to all the participants. There are really many questions to answer in the chat that we will be sending by electronic emails and the different ways we have. It's a very suitable topic for the present, especially for the region of Latin America and Caribbean, but also globally it has been a great value for the scientific results and that have been presented today in general and of great importance for the banana sector. They have addressed issues of great relevance as are the related with the improvements in technology to address the resistance to the different diseases and with emphasis on the four-tropical race. It was resolved to different reports of promising materials making use of different countries as is the case of the Formosana with the different evaluations, adaptations with its ergonomic characteristics and the adequacy also by different companies. It is emphasized in the need to always do it through a management program of the disease and of great importance and value its evaluation in the field. It is emphasized all related to the agronomic behavior of the Formosana and other promising varieties for the case of resistance to the four-tropical race. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the related with the varieties have several aspects to highlight and in this way to be able to improve the management alternatives to achieve greater resilience in the culture. The different results of the improvement program such as the case of Wageningen, Sirat, Philippina, South Africa, El Fia with new promising materials always looking for the issues related to the quality of the fruit and its application in different countries focusing on the agronomic performance of the different promising varieties. As well as the need to always link the different programs of genetic improvement and the academic and scientific sector to know what we can take to the table, to the field of our producers. To conclude from the different programs of genetic improvement presented today and that exist at the level of the different countries and at the global level of their scientific institutions the alternatives are evident to access biosecure to new alternative varieties product of genetic improvement to be able to face the four-tropical race. In this way we conclude our webinar session and tomorrow we will be finding again and thank you very much to all international experts for their conference and to the participants for the questions submitted in the chat as well as to our colleagues from the World Forum of Banano and Peralta for everything related to the logistics of the workshop. Thank you Victor. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Tomorrow we thank you especially to the panelists and to the service of interpretation.