Gabe, what causes a tetraploid like many of the Fhia varieties to produce seedless fruits? Since it is an even polyploid, shouldn't all the sets pair up. Does anyone know if there's fertilization but the ovules just don't develop into seeds? If so, would these varieties be considered non-parthenocarpic?
Here's a link on banana,
http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/ae216e....htm#TopOfPage. Its a long read that I mostly scanned through but somewhere in there it talks about breeding strategies used. The Fhia method has been to breed diploid varieties for disease resistance and then crossing these with triploid female plants. Anybody up for breeding them for cold resistance? =) The other method was to use chemicals on diploids to induce them to tetraploids, then crossing the two. I wonder how hard it would be to get a tetraploid basjoo, this would probably seem to be the way to go considering its hard to cross M. basjoo?!?