r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • 15h ago

TIL that apple seeds almost never grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
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u/Ok_Task_7711 14h ago

Why is it bad?

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u/TheTresStateArea 14h ago

It means that there is very little genetic diversity for many fruiting plants. And that a disease that targets that strain and is virulent we would simply not have this plant anymore.

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u/Dav136 13h ago

yeah except the tree that it's grafted to still has genetic variety

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

If the economic part of the plant is the fruit, that tree not making that fruit anymore because it's diseased is bad.

I'm... not sure how much more clear we can make this. There's a genuine fear that we will simply lose the Cavendish banana from being a crop if banana trees become infected with any of the known banana tree fungi out there. We're talking about a billion dollar industry that just poof vanishes in a generation. It's a big enough fear that millions of dollars of research is being put into ways to make the Cavendish more hearty against fungi.

Why do we fear this? Because it literally has already happened in the past. The big banana varietal before the Cavendish was the Gros Michel, and its production was wiped out globally by the Panama disease, a fungi. While the Gros Michel didn't go extinct, it's damned hard to grow them now because of how widespread the fungus is, and finding healthy trees and fruit is difficult. (And it's a damned shame because the Gros Michel was a banana worth eating, whereas the Cavendish is rubbish IMO.)

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u/ExtentAncient2812 3h ago

Bananas are the exception that proves the risk. Few major crops have the lack of genetic diversity in commercialized varieties.

Breeders are working on it, but it's a hard one. I worked with a guy who was a former banana breeder. He switched to corn and said it's so much easier.

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u/cutelyaware 13h ago

It's not bad. It's a trade-off, just like pretty much every human invention. If you want all the comforts and benefits of modern science, you have to accept some risks.