Musa (genus)
Musa is one of two or three genera in the family Musaceae. The genus includes flowering plants producing edible bananas and plantains. Around 70 species of Musa are known, with a broad variety of uses.
Though they grow as high as trees, banana and plantain plants are not woody and their apparent "stem" is made up of the bases of the huge leaf stalks. Thus, they are technically gigantic herbaceous plants.
Musa species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species, including the giant leopard moth and other Hypercompe species, including H. albescens (only recorded on Musa), H. eridanus, and H. icasia.
Banana plants represent some of the largest herbaceous plants existing in the present, with some reaching up to 9 metres (30 ft) in height. The large herb is composed of a modified underground stem (rhizome), a false trunk, a network of roots, and a large flower spike. The false trunk is an aggregation of the basal portion of leaf sheathes; it is not until the plant is ready to flower that a true stem grows up through the sheath and droops back down towards the ground.[2] At the end of this stem grows a peduncle with many female flowers protected by large purple-red bracts. The extension of the stem (this part called the rachis) continues growth downward where a terminal male flower grows. The leaves originate from a pseudostem and unroll to show a leaf blade with two lamina halves.[3] Musa reproduces by both sexual (seed) and asexual (suckers) processes, utilizing asexual means when producing sterile (non-seedy) fruits. Further qualities to distinguish Musa include spirally arranged leaves, fruits as berries, latex-producing cells present, 5 connate and 1 member of the inner whorl distinct, and petiole with one row of air channels.[4]
The genus Musa was first named by Carl Linnaeus in 1753.[5] The name is a Latinization of the Arabic name for the fruit, mauz (موز). Mauz meaning Musa is discussed in the 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine, which was translated to Latin in medieval times and well known in Europe.[Note 1] Muz is also the Turkish, Persian, and Somali name for the fruit. Some sources assert that Musa is named for Antonius Musa, physician to the Emperor Augustus.[6] According to Roger Blench, the ultimate origin of musa is in the Trans–New Guinea languages, whence they were borrowed into the Austronesian languages and across Asia, via the Dravidian languages of India, into Persian, Greek and Arabic as a Wanderwort:[7]
The word "banana" came to English from Spanish and Portuguese, which in turn apparently obtained it from a West African language (possibly Wolof).[8]
