Seedless fruits
QUESTION: Why do plants like banana produce fruits if there are no seeds meant for dispersal?
P. Sapna, Chennai
ANSWER 1: Fruits are a product of fertilization. Generally fruits will germinate into plants that will again flower, offering another opportunity for fertilization. But the bananas we find in the store bear tiny almost-remnants of seeds that will not germinate, but the wild, banana "fruits" have seeds.
The botanical term parthenocarpy refers to the development of ovary of a flower into a fruit without fertilization. And these fruits are seedless.
Fruits that develop parthenocarpically are typically seedless. Some seedless fruits come from sterile triploid plants, with three sets of chromosomes rather than two.
The triploid seeds are obtained by crossing a fertile tetraploid (4n chromosomes) with a diploid (2n chromosomes) plant.
Male flowers of the diploid plant provide the pollen that pollinates (but does not fertilize) the sterile plant. The act of pollination induces fruit development without fertilization. The small black dots seen inside banana are the remnants of aborted ovules that did not mature into seeds.
Banana has an asexual reproduction where the new plants are identical in every respect to the parent plant. The asexual reproduction involves no union of cells or nuclei of cells; there is not mingling of genetic traits too.
The plants die after they have produced fruits and are replaced by others that arise from the underground stem, and that process can keep on going for many years.
https://www.thehindu.com/seta/2005/0...0301251600.htm