We have seedless grapes, oranges, and watermellon… but is that the limit to our “seedless technology”? Around Halloween, some seedless pumpkins would be awfully handy.
In: Biology
Seedless plants can’t produce *the actual seeds* due to basically having too many copies of DNA, which doesn’t allow the normal process where each parent passing along exactly 1/2 of the DNA needed for the next generation.
As you can notice with seedless watermelons, the plants may still try to produce seeds, but they’re not fully formed. The plant still forms the rest of the fruit which is important, because that’s of course what we eat. This means the inner stringy *stuff* in pumpkins, which contains seeds, would likely still exist even without seeds inside it, and it wouldn’t be any easier to clean the pumpkin for carving.
Seedless plants are also harder to reproduce because you can’t plant the seeds. You either need to take a cutting to grow basically a copy of the plant starting with a branch (instead of starting with a seed) or you need to go through the process to create seeds that produce a seedless plant to begin with, which is tricky.
You wouldn’t want to apply this to pumpkins because their vines die every year. So you’d need to re-make a seedless pumpkin variety every year. Much easier/cheaper to take seeds from this year’s pumpkins and plant them to grow next year’s pumpkins.
Most of our seedless fruit grows on vines or trees that can be planted once and produce for many years.
Latest Answers