Abstract
The present day edible bananas are either diploids or triploids or rarely tetraploids with a vast combination of A and B genomes obtained from the two wild diploid species Musa acuminata and M. balbisiana through intraand interspecific hybridizations. A simple protocol for obtaining meiotic metaphase plates of some Musa cultivars has been described in this paper. Structural alterations of the chromosomes in these cultivars were studied to assess the genomic constituents. Pairing variability was observed in the different cultivars with the occurrence of multivalent structures in the allotriploids indicating segmental homology or homeologous pairing among the A and B genome of M. acuminata and M. balbisiana probably due to common ancestry of the two wild species.
