Genetically engineered "super bananas", with added Vitamin A, will undergo its first human trial in the U.S., Australian researchers announced Monday.
The super banana is developed at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
These bananas are now sent to the America and is expected that the six-week trial, to ascertain how well they lift vitamin A levels in humans, will start soon.
"Good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food," project leader Professor James Dale, said in a press release.
"We know our science will work," Professor Dale said. "We made all the constructs, the genes that went into bananas, and put them into bananas here at QUT."
According to Dale, in Highland or East African culture banana is a staple food. However, the fruit has low levels of micro-nutrients, particularly pro-vitamin A and iron. He said that enriching the staple food was the best way to help alleviate the problem.
The team said that the genetically modified banana looks the same on the outside. However, the inside flesh has more orangey colour than regular cream colour. This should not be a problem, Dale said.
Dale said that after the genetically modified banana gets a nod for commercial cultivation in Uganda, similar technology could possibly be expanded to crops in other countries such as Rwanda, parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Tanzania.
"In West Africa farmers grow plantain bananas and the same technology could easily be transferred to that variety as well," he said.