The chicken or the egg?
The age old question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Of course, chickens come from eggs (fertilized ones), but then that begs the question, where do the eggs come from? Chickens???
Following that line of thought, I began to wonder, where do seedless fruits (like seedless watermelon) come from? After all, a seedless fruit is somewhat of an oxymoron, since a fruit is defined as a mature ovary containing seeds. And if the fruits themselves contain no seeds, how do they propagate?
Turns out seedless fruit plants generally propagate through grafting. In other words, the farmer cuts off a part of the plant and uses it to grow a new one. And this clipping, having the same genetic makeup as its original, essentially produces a clone of the parent. Talk about identical twins gone wild!
However, one thing to note - unlike other seedless fruits, seedless watermelon actually come from seeds, which are produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines of watermelon. And the fruits result from pollination provided by neighboring diploid strains.
So, while we can't definitively solve the chicken egg riddle, we (at least) managed to decipher the origins of the seedless watermelon riddle... the seeds came first!
Following that line of thought, I began to wonder, where do seedless fruits (like seedless watermelon) come from? After all, a seedless fruit is somewhat of an oxymoron, since a fruit is defined as a mature ovary containing seeds. And if the fruits themselves contain no seeds, how do they propagate?
Turns out seedless fruit plants generally propagate through grafting. In other words, the farmer cuts off a part of the plant and uses it to grow a new one. And this clipping, having the same genetic makeup as its original, essentially produces a clone of the parent. Talk about identical twins gone wild!
However, one thing to note - unlike other seedless fruits, seedless watermelon actually come from seeds, which are produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines of watermelon. And the fruits result from pollination provided by neighboring diploid strains.
So, while we can't definitively solve the chicken egg riddle, we (at least) managed to decipher the origins of the seedless watermelon riddle... the seeds came first!
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