One of the ten most important fruit crop in the world are dessert and cooking bananas. Dessert banans are intensively cultivated for export to Europe and North America, while cooking banans and some dessert bananas are cultivated most often in backyard gardens for local consumption in tropical countries. Bananas belong to the Musaceae family and are among the tallest monocotyledons. Mojor aims for the molecular studies, in progress at CIRAD at present, are the construction of genetic maps, a better understanding of chromosomal structural differentiation in Musa, the analysis of quantitative characters as well as a comprehensive study of molecular genetic diversity. Screening of a size fractioned genomic Pst 1 library produced more than 150 (17% of the library) potential microsatellite markers (54% (AG) n, 25% (AC) n, 14% (AT) n, 7% (GC) n). At present, ten of these candidate clones have been toroughly tested on different banana varieties. As an example, one microsatellite site studies uncovers 19 alleles in a test population of 19 individuals, a different alleles identifying every haploid genome of a tetraploid individual in the test population. A comparatively high level of polymorphism has yet never been detected by any kind of marker in banana. A non-radioactive analysis procedure for VNTR alleles (based on silver stained polyacrylamide gels) has been successfully tested for routine screening of large mapping populations