Varieties:
– Common seedless fruits include watermelons, tomatoes, and grapes.
– Seedless citrus fruits include oranges, lemons, and limes.
– Recent development includes seedless sweet peppers.
– Seedless peppers combine male sterility with fruit-setting ability.
– Plant hormones promote fruit growth in seedless plants.
Biological description:
– Seedless fruits develop through parthenocarpy or stenospermocarpy.
– Triploid plants produce seedless banana and watermelon fruits.
– Some species like tomato produce seedless fruit without pollination.
– Seedless plants are propagated vegetatively or through grafting.
– Seedless watermelons are grown from seeds produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines.
Disadvantages:
– Seedless crops lead to reduced genetic diversity.
– Cloned plants are vulnerable to pests and diseases.
– Commercial bananas are clones vulnerable to Panama disease.
– Lack of genetic diversity increases susceptibility to threats.
– Cloned plants face risks due to lack of genetic variation.
References:
– Frost & Soost (1968) discuss seed reproduction in citrus.
– Gmitter & Ling (1991) study embryogenesis in nonchimeric tetraploid plants.
– Soost & Cameron (1985) examine triploid Pummelo-grapefruit hybrids.
– Nowicki et al. (2013) analyze tomato sterility in ps and ps-2 lines.
– Robinson et al. (2012) provide insights on vine varieties and flavors.
Additional Information:
– Seedless fruits are biologically contradictory as fruits usually contain seeds.
– Techniques like inducing parthenocarpy in species contribute to seedless fruit production.
– Seedless plants propagate through vegetative methods or grafting.
– Seedless watermelons are grown from seeds produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines.
– Seedless crops face challenges due to reduced genetic diversity and susceptibility to pests and diseases.
A seedless fruit is a fruit developed to possess no mature seeds. Since eating seedless fruits is generally easier and more convenient, they are considered commercially valuable.
Most commercially produced seedless fruits have been developed from plants whose fruits normally contain numerous relatively large hard seeds distributed throughout the flesh of the fruit.