List of banana cultivars

They are classified into groups according to a genome-based system introduced by Ernest Cheesman, Norman Simmonds, and Ken Shepherd, which indicates the degree of genetic inheritance from the two wild parents and the number of chromosomes (ploidy).

[4] Unlike the wild species, which have seeds, cultivated bananas are almost always seedless (parthenocarpic) and hence sterile, so they have to be propagated vegetatively.

In 1955, researchers Norman Simmonds and Ken Shepherd proposed abandoning traditional Latin-based botanical names for cultivated bananas.

The second is relationship to the two ancestral species, which may be determined by genetic analysis or by a scoring system devised by Simmonds and Shepherd.

Intermediate scores suggest mixed ancestry: for example, 45 would be expected for diploids with equal genetic contributions from both species.

The AAB Group, for example, comprises triploid cultivars with more genetic inheritance from M. acuminata than M. balbisiana.

Other lines of evidence suggest a more complex genome structure is present in other banana cultivars, so the group names should not be taken at face value.

Micropropagation involves growing plants from very small amounts of source tissue, sometimes even a single cell, under sterile conditions using artificial techniques to induce growth from mitochondrial relief systems.

The purpose of micropropagation is often to produce a large number of genetically identical offspring in the manner of Shannon et al.

The AAB Group's centre of diversity is Central and West Africa, where a large number of cultivars were domesticated following the introduction of ancestral Plantains from Asia, possibly 2000–3000 years ago.