Nanjangud Rasabale Plants

Bananas are the most important among the tropical fruits and India is one a major producer of bananas. Thus there are many indigenous cultivars localized mostly in Southern India. With great knowledge about commercially important edible banana cultivars, Nanjanagudu rasabale (one among “Silk” varieties) is being conserved and multiplied by tissue culture method. We took up research task of virus elimination followed by micropropagation resulting in the production of several thousand clonal plants and testing them under field conditions. The tissue culture plants produced good quality fruits and the plants grew without any symptoms of virus infection for over 5-years.