https://srilankafoundation.

org/newsfeed/banana-nation-your-comprehensive-guide-to-sri-lankan-
bananas/

Inroduction

Musa L. (Musaceae) comprises of 68-70 species that distributed all over South East countries,
African, Asia. They are monocots. Musa species name is originated from Arab which is “al-
Mauz” and latinized by Carl Linnaeus as “Musa”. It is known as banana. Musa species are
important to agricultural industries as the peels of Musa acuminate gives out hormonal growth
gases such as ethylene that would enhance the ripening of fruits. Then, Musa species have been
cultivated in many parts of the world as edible fruits (Musa acuminate X paradasica), and
ornamental trees (Musa ornata). Musa belongs to Musaceae family and is divided into sections
(Musa, Ensete and Musella). Most wild banana such as Musa acuminata is edible and lots of
varieties through hybridization with Musa balbisiana.

Due to adequate number of species of selected species, regarding it to see how does Musa
species are made into phylogeny and its relatedness towards each species, we used Internal
Transcribed Spacer 1, (ITS) from a non-coding region. ITS do not encode protein in chloroplast
(cp) genome. Location of ITS1 is between two coding region of 18S and 5.8S. Other
characteristics of ITS1 it the region is rapidly evolving and suited to be used to compare species
and closely related genera.

In this mini project we are comparing our result on a prepared data (Gene Bank) and a published
data from many resources. They ways we done is by making Parsimony and Maximum
Likelihood Trees. Consensus tree are made strictly and labelled by bootstrap values. The
estimation is site-by site data consideration and chooses the best trees according to the fewest
number of steps.

Objective

To differentiate fifteen species relationship under genus Musaceae

Discussion-Morphology

Banana plants is a tree-like perennial herb. It is claimed as the aerial part of the parent plant dies
after growing season. Banana plants are considered as banana “trees” as it resembles just like a
tree, but, the stem we look at is actually just a pseudo stem. The real stem is connected from the
root to the peduncle. The layers of giant leaves and its sheaths made the stem larger, and
considered as pseudo stem.

The roots of the banana plants are rhizome, as it is the true stem of the banana plant. It is
categorized as horizontal underground roots from multiple nodes. The main photosynthetic organ
of the banana plant is the leaves. It emerges from the center and divided into two parts, the leaf
sheath and cigar leaf. Leaf sheath are part of leaves that elongates from the distal end,
contracting to be a petiole. The petiole becomes the midrib of the two halves of the lamina. Cigar
leaves are the leaves that is still rolled like a cylinder. In the inflorescence parts, the female parts
appears first, the ovary develops into seedless fruit without being pollinated by male gametes.
The male flowers in the male bud produce pollen but that may or may not be sterile. They are
two types of peduncle growth, upright and downwards.