How is seedless fruit made?

Question

random question, just wondering

Answer 1

Cloning!

Answer 2

Seedless fruits and vegetables are produced by meticulous cross-breeding

Answer 3

OK, seedless grapes.

A farmer discovers a mutant grape vine that produces grapes without seeds.  There's no shortcut, you have to look.  I always imagined that they find out by eating grapes.  One day they notice that nothing went crunch.  I expect lots of fat grape farmers.

In the wild, these mutant grape vines would live out their lives and die childless.  End of the line.  But with the aid of humans, and these mutants take over the world!

The next step is that you make cuttings of the vine and grow lots of clones.  These produce grapes without seeds too.  And, you make cuttings of those, and cuttings of those.  It's exponential growth.  That's where world domination comes in.  Half of all grapes sold are seedless.

But grape vines that produce red grapes don't produce black grapes, or green grapes.  So more than one mutant grape vine was needed.

Bananas can grow sexually or by cloning.  They're much cheaper to grow by cloning.  The trouble with cloning is that you have no genetic diversity.  So, let's say some fungus figures out how to get past the banana's defenses.  It's not just all over for that plant, it's all over for all bananas everywhere.  And, this has already happened.  We're on our second species of bananas.  And the new species doesn't taste as good - according to reports - I'm not nearly old enough to have tasted the previous species.  The new species was chosen in part because it is entirely resistant to the fungus that killed off the old bananas.  The bad news is that the fungus has figured it out.  Banana plantations are dropping like flies.  In less than a decade, we'll all be singing "Yes, we have no bananas."

And half of the world's grapes could be in just as much trouble.  You can wine about it all you want, but it will still be true.

And it's also what happened with the potato blight.

We've got to stop cloning around.

Answer 4

afaik It's just picked early - specific times vary for each fruit - such that the seeds have not grown into anything "hard" yet, though the bits that form the seed are often still there.

Answer 5

Most seedless varieties of fruit are triploid (3n), meaning they have three copies of every chromosome as compared to the more common diploid (2n).  Having three copies causes a problem when it is time for the fruit to make gametes through meiosis because the chromosomes don't pair properly.

Because the fruits can't make seeds, they are reproduced through vegetative cloning.