Wahengbam R. Singh, Sorokhaibam S. Singh and Karuna Shrivastava
Banana is the one of the most important fruit plants of Manipur which is related with the culture. There are many indigenous banana varieties in Manipur as wild and cultivated forms, some banana Pseudo stem and male buds are used as medicinal plants for women, some groups are very costly because of their rarity of cultivation and used only in holistic purpose. Some wild species of bananas like Ensete glaucum, Musa cheesmanii, M. magnesium, M. balbisiana, Musa laterita, etc. have been recorded from the state. Many domesticated banana have proved to be triploid, (2n= 3x = 33) with genome constitution of AAA, AAB or ABB. There are also seedless cultivated AA and AB diploid, and tetraploids (2n= 4x = 44) with genome constitution of AAAA, AAAB, AABB and ABBB. Researchers have used modified genome score card (Singh & Uma, 1996) and 15 important characters of banana plants were used for genome classification of the banana. There are mainly two types of banana genome i.e. AA genome (Musa acuminata) and BB genome (Musa balbisiana) and in the genome score cards are developed with two sections. In the AA genome section’s characters were carried 1 mark each on the other hand the BB section characters were carried 5 marks of each character. Most of the cultivars are triploid in nature, tetraploid and vary rare type of diploid is also found and some of the samples were the same genome score but different in their morphological and floral characters, some are same genome type but different in genome scores and some of the cultivars have overlapping scores between the genome types so these need to be characterised using molecular markers
