How do seedless grapes and seedless watermelons reproduce?
I found this on the web. I too thought it was a simple cross-bred hybrid that was seedless but it’s more complicated than that. “Normally, watermelons are “diploid.” This means they have two sets of 11 chromosomes, the structures that contain an organism’s genetic material. They get one set of chromosomes from each parent, for a total of 22. Producing a seedless watermelon involves three steps. First, a plant is treated with colchicine, a substance that allows chromosomes to duplicate, but prevents the copies from being distributed properly to dividing cells. As a result, a plant with four sets of chromosomes is created, a “tetraploid.” In the second step, a tetraploid plant is crossed with a diploid to produce offspring that are….? That’s right, triploid, with three sets. They get half the number of chromosomes from each parent. Finally, the triploid seeds are grown into plants. Although they must be germinated under very careful conditions, once the seeds grow into small plantlets, t
