Most cooking and several desert bananas are interspecific triploid hybrids between Musa acuminata (A genome) and M. balbisiana (B genome). To investigate the possibility of chromosome exchanges between these two species, Jeridi et al. develop a genomic in situ hybridization protocol suitable for analysing meiosis metaphase I from Musa pollen mother cells. They demonstrate that chromosome pairing between M. acuminata and M. balbisiana chromosomes is frequent in triploid interspecific hybrids, results that both provide new insight into cultivar evolution and have important implications for future breeding.
