Get Ready For Better Apples - First Gene For Seedlessness Characterized
Monday, March 14, 2011 - 15:33
in Biology & Nature
Bananas in their natural state have up to a hundred seeds but all commercial varieties that you see in stores are seedless. Making seedless varieties made bananas wildly popular, which was good for the people who grow them and good for the people who eat them. That is a science win. Researchers have now discovered a way to make "the most delicious fruit known to man", as Mark Twain called it, more popular with the public also. The cherimoya, or custard apple, has lots of big, awkward seeds but a group of researchers studied the seedless variety of sugar apple, a relative of the cherimoya, and noted that the ovules, which would normally form seeds, lacked an outer coat. read more