• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    5 months ago

    It depends on the fruit in question, really.

    Seedless Watermelon, for example, was developed by hybridizing diploid plants (has 2 chromosomes,) with tetraploid plants (they have 4 chromosomes,). Incidentally, this creates a triploid that happens to be sterile.

    the way this is done is taking the pollen from a male diploid watermelon and pollinating female tetraploids. the fruit grows as you would expect and develop seeds that are themselves sterile (they can grow into plants, but don’t generate seeds.) (we still commonly grow seeded water melons because inorder to trigger fruit development, the seedless variety needs to be pollinated; it just doesn’t develop the mature seeds, and instead, has ‘seed casings’- the white things.)

    many seedles variets of grapes can be propagated from cuttings; though they too were originally developed the same as watermelons.

    Bananas are all clones; by the way. The only kinds of banana that are also edible are sterile. (this is actually potentially a huge problem.) Banana trees will send up new shoots every so often coming up along side the main stem/trunk, these stalks are what produce the fruit, but they can be cut off at the base (with some roots,) and then replanted.

    Tree fruits are generally hybridized and grafted onto root stock. (apples commonly are grafted because it’s faster and you can use a more hardy rootstock with better varieties of apples. The roots are genetically one variety of tree, while everything else is another.) this would include otherwise sterile varieties.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      5 months ago

      Regarding bananas, if I got this right, all bananas and plantains of the same type are a clone, but different types were created by independently crossing Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Both species natively have seeds, but apparently their hybrids tend to be seedless.