A seedless fruit is a fruit developed to possess no mature seeds. As consumption of 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.
Varieties
Common varieties of seedless fruits include watermelons, grapes and bananas. Additionally, there are numerous seedless citrus fruits, such as oranges, lemons and limes.
Biology
The term "seedless fruit" is biologically somewhat contradictory, since fruits are usually defined (in a botanical sense) as mature ovaries containing seeds.
Seedless fruits can develop in one of two ways: either the fruit develops without any fertilization (parthenocarpy), or pollination triggers fruit development, but the ovules or embryos abort without producing mature seeds (stenospermocarpy). Seedless banana and watermelon fruits are produced on triploid plants, whose three sets of chromosomes prevent meiosis from taking place and thus the plants cannot produce fertile gametes. Such plants can arise by spontaneous mutation or by hybridization between diploid and tetraploid individuals of the same or different species. Some species, such as pineapple and cucumber, produce seedless fruit if not pollinated, but do produce seeded fruit if pollination occurs.
Lacking seeds, and therefore the capacity to propagate via the fruit, the plants are generally propagated vegetatively from cuttings, by grafting, or in the case of bananas, from "pups" (offsets). In such cases, the resulting plants are genetically identical clones. By contrast, seedless watermelons are grown from seeds. These seeds are produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines of watermelon, with the resulting seeds producing sterile triploid plants. Fruit development is triggered by pollination, so these plants must be grown alongside a diploid strain to provide pollen. Triploid plants with seedless fruits can also be produced using endosperm culture for the regeneration of triploid plantlets from endosperm tissue via somatic embryogenesis.
One disadvantage of most seedless crops is a significant reduction in the amount of genetic diversity in the species. As genetically identical clones, a pest or disease that affects one individual is likely to be capable of affecting every clone of that individual. For example, the vast majority of commercially produced bananas are cloned from a single source, the Cavendish cultivar, and those plants are currently threatened worldwide by a newly discovered fungal disease to which they are highly susceptible.
