The bananas in your supermarket and that you eat for breakfast are facing functional extinction due to the disease Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), caused by a fungal pathogen called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense (Foc) tropical race 4 (TR4).
Funguses like fusarium scare me. They lie in wait for us to die so they can breakdown our bodies for molecular scrap. They eat our food, our homes, even live inside of us. Some don’t even have the decency to wait until death and start to dig in while we’re still alive. It’s been a cool, wet summer where I live an blight is already already starting to emerge in my tomato plants. My worst nightmares center around being consumed by mold.
So then transplanting and treating with UV would work for seeds or shoots. Fusarium can’t tolerate UV, or above ground fungicides.
Bananas are clonally propagated. The pathogen is inside the vascular tissue. No way to get rid of it from plants once infected.
Fusariums have developed resistance to many fungicides. They keep becoming resistant to more.
Funguses like fusarium scare me. They lie in wait for us to die so they can breakdown our bodies for molecular scrap. They eat our food, our homes, even live inside of us. Some don’t even have the decency to wait until death and start to dig in while we’re still alive. It’s been a cool, wet summer where I live an blight is already already starting to emerge in my tomato plants. My worst nightmares center around being consumed by mold.