The development and utilization of two SCAR markers linked to the resistance of banana (Musa spp. AAA) to Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense race 4

Banana (Musa spp.) production worldwide is seriously threatened by Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc). The best way to control this disease is to grow resistant cultivars. However, it requires large-scale field evaluations and labor- and time-consuming to obtain disease-resistant germplasm. Development of early, reliable, and reproducible selection strategies are considered as the efficient approach which could speed up the selection procedure. In this study, two pairs of sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) primers related to banana Foc resistance/susceptibility were screened from 100 pairs of random primers. Correspondingly, two pairs of sequence characterized amplified region (SCAR) markers (namely SC4-F/SC4-R and SC14-F/SC14-R, respectively) were successfully generated from these two SRAP markers using 30 cultivars either resistant or susceptible to Foc. Both SCAR markers were located in mitochondrion genome and showed discriminatory power of 96.67% and 100%, respectively. Mitochondrial proteins possibly play a very important role in banana resistance to Foc. In additional, these two SCAR markers were employed simultaneously to screen potential resistant germplasm from 53 accessions with unknown resistance to Foc, and the results revealed a consistency of 83.0% with each other, further indicating their high reliability and reproducibility. These results suggest that both SCAR markers could be used in molecular marker-assisted selection for banana germplasm resistant to Fusarium.