Banana Streak Virus activation by tissue culture in natural interspecific banana hybrids

Banana and plantains are important in Burundi as a staple food crop and source of income for farmers. Nevertheless, their productions are threatened by pathogens among which viruses are especially harmful. Elimination procedures of viruses are mainly performed by banana tissue culture techniques (TC) giving good sanitation results for most bananas’ viruses.
However, Banana Streak Virus (BSV) a pararetrovirus is activated by TC for banana with the B genome. Therefore, there is a risk of encouraging the emergence of BSV in Burundi by the distribution of TC products to growers.
In this work, we studied the activation of BSV by tissue culture in 5 banana cultivars collected in Burundi and micropropagated in vitro. The BSV activation was demonstrated in 4 cultivars using molecular tools.