Scientists Developing Seedless Fruit

DAVIS, Calif.Plant scientists have discovered new gene that could pave the way to produce seedless varieties in sugar apple, cherimoya and perhaps other fruit crops, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers in Spain studying the seedless variety of sugar apple noticed that the ovules, which would normally form seeds, lacked an outer coat. They looked similar to the ovules of a mutant of the lab plant Arabidopsis discovered at a lab in UC Davis in the late 1990s. In Arabidopsis, the defective plants do not make seeds or fruit, but the mutant sugar apple produces full-sized fruit with white, soft flesh without the large, hard seeds. The two teams collaborated and discovered that the same gene was responsible for uncoated ovules in both the Arabidopsis and sugar apple mutants.

This is the first characterization of a gene for seedlessness in any crop plant," Charles Gasser, professor of plant biology at UC Davis said. "This could be the next bananait would make it a lot more popular," Charles Gasser, professor of plant biology at UC Davis said, noting bananas in their natural state have up to a hundred seeds; however, all commercial varieties are seedless.