Résumé
Banana and plantains belong to #Musaceae# family and are among the tallest monocotyledons. Main cultivars are triploid, highly sterile, parthenocarpic and clonally propagated. They are susceptible to several diseases that seriously threaten plantations. CIRAD's breading schemes are based on the use of diploids (2n=2x=22). In order to better understand banana genetics, more knowledge must be gained about the complex genome structure and phylogenetic relationships of hybrids, cultivars and wild types. This would help to develop new improvement strategies based on marker assisting breeding. Mandatory to management and monitoring of these strategies is the rapid and reliable screening of large numbers of accessions, implying tight cooperation between "biotechnology centers" and "biodiversity centers" worlwide. The study of the #Musaceae#, excitingly complex in the late 1800s, profited well from the taxo-morphologic inventory system developed by British scientists in a twenty year effort to coherently classify wild type species and cultivars (Cheesman, Shepherd, Simmonds, 1940es-1960es). This system still holds true under the analytic fire of the actual, modern, molecular markers. These markers are best know under their acronyms: AFLP, CAPS, RAPD, RFLP, SCAR, SSR, VNTR to name the most described ones. The present communication is meant to be overview on molecular markers as applied to #Musa# genetic diversity studies and mapping at CIRAD from 1987 to 1997. The molecular data will soon be accessible over the "Net" in TROPGENE-DB (a molecular biology database on tropical crops at CIRAD on the ACeDB algorithm family). (Résumé d'auteur)