Deserved recognition markku's musa monikers

摘要

Markku Hakkinen is a longtime friend and supporter of the California Rare Fruit Growers. He has contributed numerous beautiful photos to our annual Fruit Shoot photo contest, and illustrating from his wealth of photo archives has prepared for the Fruit Gardener many interesting articles about his arduous expeditions into Borneo, China, Thailand and Viet Nam in search of banana species that have never been scientifically categorized. In line with Markku's area of expertise, he has also written an article to explain how he had grown an extensive collection of bananas in his apartment in Finland. That collection of 50 taxa was initially moved into the University of Helsinki Botanic Garden where Markku has been working as a research fellow. A subsequentdonation was made to Biodiversity International Genebank in Leuven, Belgium, and the collection is now maintained under auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. From this collection, plantlets are cloned in vitro and madeavailable to researchers. Of major importance to the scientific community, Markku's recent work with geneticists who performed dna analysis led him to prepare a major revision of the taxonomy of Musa. He has published his proposed revision in Taxon, a publication of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. That publication is one of the final steps needed for official acceptance of Markku's proposed revisions in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants—the official set of rules dealing with the formal names given to plants. It is the standard used by scientists involved in plant research. By the current standards, Musa species are grouped into four sections, as depicted in Tree #1, below.