I See through Everything

「November 28th.」

Winter had finally arrived. A cold wind journeyed all the way from Siberia, passing over the Loess Plateau, the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Middle and Lower Reaches Plain, and the Southeast Hills. By the time it reached the Lingnan Land, most of its power was spent.

Jiang Miao wasn’t in the experimental zone. He was at the southeastern foot of Magong Mountain, northwest of Nanhu Village. He had previously instructed Lü Weibin to lease more mountain land here in Nanhu Village to serve as a crop cultivation experimental base.

The experimental zone was actually at the southern foot of Magong Mountain, right next to the crop cultivation base.

The entire crop cultivation base was situated at the southeastern foot of Magong Mountain, laid out as four levels of terraced fields covering a total of 576 mu. This was the last piece of vacant land in Nanhu Village; the rest was either part of the reservoir area, residential zones, the beach, or the windbreak forest.

The 576 mu of terraced fields were divided into 50 planting zones of 10 mu each. The remaining 76 mu, aside from roads and buffer zones, were designated for supporting facilities and buildings.

As the company’s financial resources grew more abundant, Jiang Miao intensified his efforts to collect various types of seed and seedling resources.

This was especially true for herbaceous plants and small shrub-like crops from tropical and subtropical regions, which now filled five of the planting zones.

This included more than fifty major categories, such as sugarcane, jute, bananas, papayas, cassava, sweet potatoes, peanuts, lemongrass, and mung beans.

The reason Jiang Miao preferred herbaceous crops was their faster iteration speed.

Take the 50 banana plants before him, for example. Using his connections at the Lingnan Agricultural Research Institute, he had purchased this nearly extinct variety—the legendary Big Mac Banana. Through tissue culture in his lab, he had cultivated these 50 seedlings.

They had been growing for over two months and were still in the seedling stage.

The Big Mac Banana is seedless, has a thick peel, and an appealing appearance. Its thick skin makes it resistant to bruising and easier to ship, all of which made it an excellent export product.

The reason it is now nearly extinct is mainly because Panama disease appeared in the early 20th century and infected the Big Mac Banana, causing its yields to plummet.

Currently, it is only grown in small quantities in southern Siam and Malaysia.

As for why crossbreeding or genetic modification techniques weren’t used to make the Big Mac Banana immune to Panama disease, there were certainly reasons.

Otherwise, agricultural research institutes and commercial companies in various countries would have done so long ago.

The reasons why the Big Mac Banana could not make a comeback through traditional breeding or genetic modification techniques are very complex and include the following:

Genetic Monoculture: The Big Mac Banana is a triploid, meaning it cannot reproduce sexually and can only be propagated asexually. This results in its genes being almost completely identical, leading to a lack of genetic diversity. Unlike sexually reproducing organisms, it cannot produce resistance genes for Panama disease through genetic recombination.

Breeding Limitations: Traditional crossbreeding methods have limited effect on the Big Mac Banana. As a triploid, its chromosomes cannot pair properly during meiosis, making it difficult to produce viable gametes. Therefore, the probability of obtaining fertile offspring by crossbreeding it with other varieties is extremely low, which in turn makes it difficult to introduce disease-resistance genes through hybridization.

Scarcity of Resistance Genes: The banana’s own gene pool contains few disease-resistance genes, and most of those are derived from the pathogen’s own genes. This makes separating the relevant genes difficult, resulting in a lack of effective genetic resources that could be used to improve the Big Mac Banana’s disease resistance.

Pathogen Complexity: The fungus that causes Panama disease, *Fusarium oxysporum*, has multiple physiological races and is constantly mutating and evolving. This increases the difficulty of cultivating varieties with lasting resistance. Even if one or a few resistance genes are introduced via genetic engineering, it is very difficult to defend against the pathogen’s many virulent strains.

For Jiang Miao, however, these problems were not particularly difficult.

There is a classic line in the movie *Jurassic Park*:

"Life finds a way."

In his own tissue culture lab, Jiang Miao used various methods to induce genetic mutations, constantly stimulating the leaf cells of the Big Mac Banana to mutate.

He screened for a first-generation variety with resistance to *Fusarium oxysporum*. After cultivating these into seedlings, he used them for a second round of induced mutation, a process he repeated for three generations.

Then, from the third-generation mutants, he selected suitable types. Using a technique of cell fusion combined with chromosome loss, he fused cells from the triploid Big Mac Banana mutants with haploid cells from varieties like the Hua Jiao. This process induced chromosome loss, ultimately producing diploid, fertile bananas.

The 50 Big Mac Banana seedlings before him were the result of this process. They were diploid Big Mac Bananas, selected from the five best-performing types among the third-generation mutants and created using the cell fusion and chromosome loss technique.

The main characteristic of these five Big Mac Banana varieties was their extremely high resistance to *Fusarium oxysporum*. They also retained the original flavor of the Big Mac. Furthermore, their disease-resistance gene segments differed from one another, allowing them to naturally crossbreed to achieve even better disease resistance and increase their genetic diversity.

In fact, this technique could also be used on ginkgo trees.

Any plant with a uniform genetic makeup could use this technique to increase its genetic diversity, thereby escaping the predicament of genetic monoculture.

As for why other research institutions didn’t use the cell fusion and chromosome loss technique...

The answer is that the technology is currently immature, with a very low success rate and extremely low efficiency. This is because cell fusion produces a massive number of fused cells, and it is very difficult to determine which ones are the successful fusions.