How Do They Make Seedless Fruit?
Scientists and farmers use several tricks involving plant genetics, breeding, and growing plants from cuttings. And no, they don't sit around picking the seeds out of every grape. Although I'd pay good money to watch someone try.
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Have you ever eaten a seedless watermelon and wondered how the hell they planted it?
Because, seriously. Where did the first seedless watermelon come from?
Turns out, there's more than one way to make a fruit without mature seeds.
Take seedless watermelons.
Farmers cross watermelon plants with different numbers of chromosome sets. Chromosomes are the little packages that carry a plant's genetic instructions.
The resulting plants usually have three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two.
That makes producing normal, mature seeds extremely difficult. But the plants can still grow watermelons when their flowers receive pollen.
And here's the ridiculous part.
Seedless watermelons actually start out as seeds.
Specially produced seeds are planted to grow the seedless-watermelon plants. The fruits themselves usually contain only soft, undeveloped seed coats.
Then there are seedless grapes.
Many popular varieties begin developing seeds, but those seeds stop growing. Growers reproduce the vines using cuttings, which are pieces of an existing plant that develop roots and grow into new vines.
Some fruits, including certain bananas, can develop without fertilization at all. That's called parthenocarpy, which is a very fancy way of saying the fruit grew without the usual seed-making process.
So seedless fruit isn't one magical invention.
It's several different plant tricks that happen to produce snacks without hard seeds.
And now I'm picturing a scientist standing in a watermelon field shouting, 'I HAVE DEFEATED THE SEEDS!'
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