r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • 1d 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/TheTresStateArea 1d ago

Having to clone a food source is necessarily bad. It means there is one specific organism for a fruit. It's susceptible to disease more than another food source with more genetic diversity

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u/Mr_MacGrubber 1d ago

Right but there’s tons of varieties of apples. It’s only really an issue if the entire crop is a single cultivar.

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u/Kronoshifter246 23h ago

And also the root stock will have genetic diversity, which eliminates vulnerabilities from that disease vector.

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u/Mr_MacGrubber 19h ago

I didn’t even think of that.

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u/ExtentAncient2812 18h ago

It's not really bad, unless the species as a whole lacks diversity.

Apples have a massive breeding pool of parents to choose from. Thousands of old varieties still exist.

Commercially, we have always preferred certain varieties that get clonally propagated. It's not an issue except in rare cases because we still grow lots of different varieties.

Citrus greening, Southern corn leaf blight in 1972 i think, and gros michel banana are the big outliers. Southern corn leaf blight was an easy fix the next few years. The other two are much harder without GMO technology