Eli5 How do people grow seedless watermelons? Like where do they get the seeds?
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Some men can’t make sperm. It’s the same thing. They found a watermelon that’s shooting blanks, then they got that watermelon’s parents to make more babies.
They treat regular seeds with a chemical called colchicine that messes up their genetic makeup, making them unable to produce seeds.
Source: I studied this in chemistry class
To make a baby, mom and dad make special cells that combine to make a baby. These special cells are called “germ cells”. Each germ cell has half of special instructions to make the cells that will make up a new person, and you need both halves of the instructions, one from the mom and one from the dad, in order to make a new person.
Almost all cells in your body will have an entire set of its special instructions to make it work, and when the cell divide to make new cells, they will make another full copy of these instructions.
These special instructions are written on a tiny books called “chromosomes”. Because these special instructions are so important, we have two copies of each book, or chromosome, so that if one of the books gets smudged or copied wrong, our cells can rely on the other book to figure out what to do.
But remember, the germ cell is special because it only has half of the special instructions. Luckily for us, figuring out which half of the special instructions to put into a germ cell is much easier because we have two copies of each chromosome: we put one copy of each book into each germ cell instead of both copies.
To do this, the chromosomes do a little dance while a cell divides. The chromosomes find their partner and then line up. One partner gets pulled to opposite sides of the cell, and the cell splits in half into germ cells. This process of making a germ cell with only a single copy of each chromosome is called “meiosis”.
Some plants are like people too. They need to have a germ cell from a mom and a dad in order to make new baby plants. Seeds that grow into plants are cells that have already have combined the instructions from a mom and dad germ cell.
Watermelons are a special type of plant that can either have two copies or four copies of the chromosomes, the books that half all the special instructions. When you have seeds that have four copies of chromosomes, they undergo meiosis normally, and the germ cells have two copy of the chromosomes.
**Seedless watermelons come from seeds that were made from combining a parent with two copies of chromosomes with four copies of chromosomes.** From one parent, the seedless watermelon will inherit one set of chromosomes, and from the other parent, it will inherit two sets of chromosomes. **That means that it will have three sets of chromosomes in most of its cells.**
A seedless watermelon can grow up looking normal, but it has a bit of trouble when it comes to making germ cells of its through meiosis.
Remember that the cells do a special dance to find its partner? **Well, when you have three copies of each chromosome**, they have a lot of trouble finding a dance partner, and so **the process of creating germ cells become a lot more difficult.**
That’s why in seedless watermelons don’t have seeds, because they can’t make the germ cells that would end up becoming seeds.
TL;DR: Seedless watermelons are seedless because it was born with three sets of each book and their books can’t find dance partners. But its parents could make seeds because they had two or four sets of each book.
When a daddy seedless watermelon meets a mommy seedless watermelon and they fall in love….
Put simply it’s a cross breed of two watermelon types that when out together make a seedless watermelon.
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