Joseph Bancroft’s discovery of Fusarium Wilt of banana

Malcolm J. Ryley; Andre Drenth

doi:10.1071/HR23012

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Joseph Bancroft’s discovery of Fusarium Wilt of banana

Malcolm J. Ryley

^A ^* and Andre Drenth ^B

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Centre for Crop Health, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Qld 4350, Australia.

^B Centre for Horticultural Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld 4072, Australia.

^* Correspondence to: cropdocs61@gmail.com

Historical Records of Australian Science 35(2) 158-169 https://doi.org/10.1071/HR23012

Published online: 6 March 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Australian Academy of Science. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

In the early decades of British settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788, the struggling colonials tried their hand at growing edible bananas but invariably failed. However, they grew extremely well in the Moreton Bay colony (Brisbane) and over time banana growing became an important agricultural industry there, particularly after the introduction of the Cavendish variety. All was progressing well until a new disease appeared in plantations around Brisbane in the early 1870s. The medical practitioner and naturalist Joseph Bancroft investigated the problem and concluded that a fungus was implicated as the causal agent. In the early 1900s, following serious outbreaks of a disease with similar symptoms in Caribbean countries (where it was called Panama Disease), the American bacteriologist Erwin Frink Smith studied the same disease in Cuba, and named the pathogen Fusarium cubense. Another American scientist, Elmer Walker Brandes, conclusively proved that Fusarium cubense (now called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense) was the cause of the banana disease. Bancroft’s discovery of the disease now called Fusarium Wilt not only predates other reports of the disease in the Caribbean but also represents the first scientific investigation of a plant disease in Australia.

Keywords: banana, Elmer Brandes, Erwin Frink Smith, Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense, fusarium wilt, Henry Tryon, Joseph Bancroft, Musa.

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