Eli5 How do people grow seedless watermelons? Like where do they get the seeds?
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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
1. Poke a hole in the ground
2. Cover it with dirt
3. Water and wait a few weeks
4. Boom, seedless watermelons
>How do people grow seedless watermelons?
They plant seeds for seedless watermelons and they grow. 😋
>Like where do they get the seeds?
Farmers buy those seeds from seed manufacturers (like Monsanto or DuPont).
If you are asking how are seedless watermelon seeds created, then that has to do with the cross-breeding of two specific strains of watermelon — *one diploid (normal complement of DNA) with one tetraploid (double the normal amount of DNA)* — which results in a sterile strain. So seedless watermelons are sterile, meaning that they can produce no offspring, so the seeds present (they are not truly seedless) are very slight and are hardly noticed when eaten.
Many seedless plants like Bananas are grown from cuttings, making all commercial banana plants genetic clones of each other.
But seedless watermelons are in fact grown from seeds. Diploid and Tetraploid watermelon varieties are cross pollinated to produce a sterile (seedless) watermelon plant.
They still come from seeds. It is sterile tho, it can grow but won’t reproduce. It is like using the seeds for one time only.
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