Commercial bananas are grown as a monoculture, with all banana plants cloned from one original banana plant. The commercial strains of bananas are seedless, so each new banana plant has to be manually planted from a cutting of an existing banana root. In the 1950s, the Gros Michel banana strain, the dominant export banana at that time, was destroyed by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum. A new Fusarium resistant variety, the Cavendish banana, was developed and is currently the banana strain grown for export. Recently, a Fusarium strain that successfully attacks the Cavendish strain has been documented. Which of the following best provides reasoning supporting a method that would help protect commercial banana crops from infection by pathogenic organisms such as Fusarium fungi? (A) The commercial banana strains should be exposed to X-rays to encourage random mutations that will then be passed to offspring, producing resistance to pathogenic organisms. (B) The Cavendish banana plants should be exposed to pathogenic organisms under controlled conditions, so the plants can be encouraged to mutate and develop resistance to the pathogens. (C) The commercial banana strains should not be grown in monocultures, since many pathogenic organisms are able to evolve rapidly in response to a single selective pressure. (D) Growing the Cavendish strain under different conditions will allow natural selection to produce the variation needed to resist infection by pathogenic organisms.

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Answer:

The answer is: (C) The commercial banana strains should not be grown in monocultures, since many pathogenic organisms are able to evolve rapidly in response to a single selective pressure.

Explanation:

A typical case of selection pressure is resistance to antibiotics, since selection pressure is defined as those factors that negatively affect organisms, since only organisms with an advantageous phenotype have the advantage of surviving, for example Antibiotics cause some selective pressure by eliminating bacteria that are susceptible to antibiotics, making those bacteria that are resistant survive. In this way, a monoculture would create a potential adaptation hazard for bacteria, since they could create patterns of resistance to specific selective pressures, which would make them grow rapidly.

The commercial banana strains should not be grown in monocultures, since many pathogenic organisms are able to evolve rapidly in response to a single selective pressure (Option C).

  • Vegetative propagation is a class of ase-xual mode of reproduction in which a parent is able to produce independent offspring from a plant part.

  • Vegetative reproduction is useful to produce offspring in monocultures quickly and thus increase the production of a given crop.

  • However, vegetative reproduction and monocultures raise an important disadvantage because all plants may do not exhibit resistance to a certain disease or another type of selective pressure.

In conclusion, the commercial banana strains should not be grown in monocultures, since many pathogenic organisms are able to evolve rapidly in response to a single selective pressure (Option C).

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