Abstract:

Nowdays，Fusarium wilt greatly threatens the banana industry world wide. Genetic improvement is a promising method for the breeding of disease resistant cultivars. However，currently，this method is limited due to the lack of resistant genetic resources. At present，the low efficiency of generation of transgenic banana plants and the lack of knowledge of molecular biology make it difficult to characterize defense-related genes in large-scale. A good strategy is to refer the advance tools and progresses applied and achieved in the studies of model plants. Therefore，in this study，three model plant species，i.e.，Arabidopsis thaliana，tobacco and tomato，each with several popular ecotypes，were applied to test their susceptibility to Fusarium oxysporum Schlecht. f. sp. cubense tropical race 4（FocTR4）. Our results demonstrated that，after inoculated with FocTR4，typical disease symptoms only could be observed on the tomato Money Maker. Moreover，FocTR4 could be detected and re-isolated from the discolour tissue of pseudostem near the roots of infected tomato plants，which confirmed that the whole pathogenicity was in conformity with the Koch’s Rule. A regeneration system with high efficiency was also developed for producing adventitious shoots from cotyledon of Money Maker. These results therefore lay the foundation for rapid screening genes with resistance to Fusarium wilt，via using a model plant as material.

Key words: Musa, Fusarium wilt, model plant, disease resistance