Science & Technology - Posted by Andy Fell-UC Davis on Thursday, March 17, 2011 15:51 - 6 Comments 
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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Custard apple could be top banana
Scientists have found the first characterization of a gene for seedless fruit. Seedless varieties of crops are usually achieved by selective breeding and then propagated through cuttings. (Credit: Charles Gasser)
UC DAVIS (US) —What has been called “the most delicious fruit known to man” the cherimoya or custard apple, is tainted by a preponderance of seeds—but plant scientists may have figured out how to get rid of them.
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“This could be the next banana—it would make it a lot more popular,” says Charles Gasser, professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis. All commercial varieties of banana are seedless, but the fruit has up to 100 seeds in its natural state.
The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers studied a close cousin of the cherimoya, a seedless variety of the sugar apple, and discovered its ovules lack an outer coat. Ovules are what would normally form seeds.
They looked similar to the ovules of a mutant of the lab plant Arabidopsis in which defective plants don’t make seeds or fruit.
But the mutant sugar apple produces full-sized fruit with white, soft flesh without the large, hard seeds. The same gene was responsible for uncoated ovules in both the Arabidopsis and sugar apple mutants.
“This is the first characterization of a gene for seedlessness in any crop plant,” Gasser says.
Seedless varieties of commercial fruit crops are usually achieved by selective breeding and then propagated vegetatively, for example through cuttings.
Discovery of this new gene could open the way to produce seedless varieties of sugar apple, cherimoya, and perhaps other fruit crops.
The discovery also sheds light on the evolution of flowering plants. Cherimoya and sugar apple belong to the magnolid family of plants, which branched off from the other flowering plants quite early in their evolution, Gasser says.
“It’s a link all the way back to the beginning of the angiosperms.”
The work was funded by the Spanish government, the European Union, and the National Science Foundation.
More news from UC Davis: http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/
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6 Comments
how about no new name?
how about no new name?
Woops, now it’s my turn for some criticism: artichoke instead of arctichoke.
Bonnie Van Gilder
It is called “English Custard” in Spain where I first ate this delicious fruit last year. But, I have not been able to find it in NY. Hey – maybe I can order it from UC Davis!
Sweetsop
From the photograph and the “complaint” in the text about black seeds, the fruit looks like what’s known in Jamaica as a sweetsop. A larger version, almost twice the size, with much less natural sweetness, is known as “soursop.” But what bother me immensely is the desire and push to get rid of the seeds. Nature is so bountiful is providing so many seeds and flawed, greedy, unthinking humans figure they can do better than nature. The planet’s population is growing and we’re cutting back on the seeds in the fruit that we need in order to feed people. Stupid. Plus it’s a tropical fruit, eaten by people often the target of racism in the global north. Leave people’s food alone!
Sweetsop
Also, the fruit is very fragile, soft on the outside as well as inside, so probably does not transport well. We should stop transporting tropical food to the global north (e.g. NYC) but instead build greenhouses, heated by small scale solar panels and geo-thermal, to grow the items that currently massive amounts of fuel is spent to transport, spewing CO2 etc. into the atmosphere.
Caribkid
The photo shown above is not the Custard Apple. It is the Sweet Sop, otherwise known as Sugar Apple. Although being from the same species they are vastly different in taste, color and seed content.
“The custard-apple, also called bullock’s heart or bull’s heart, is the fruit of the tree Annona reticulata. T
The fruits are variable in shape, oblong, or irregular. The size ranges from 7 centimetres (2.8 in) to 12 centimetres (4.7 in). When ripe, the fruit is brown or yellowish, with red highlights and a varying degree of reticulation, depending on variety. The flavor is sweet and pleasant, akin to the taste of ‘traditional’ custard.”
Someone has been getting too creative with names and has created a big mess. Having spent a
a few years of my life in Latin America, I am aware that the fruit displayed on this page is not the fruit chirimoya, (notice the two i’s) that I used to devour there whenever possible. My chirimoya looks like a badly faked styorofoam arctichoke on the outside and inside-except for the big black seeds- and tastes like bubble gum. According to Wikipedia and a bunch of other websites, the lumpy fruit shown on this page is Annona squamosa, the sugar apple. It is a relative of the cherimoya, annona cherimola, the custard apple, which would have been chirimoya if English writers tried harder to spell foreign words. (In Peru, where the fruit is from, and in Mexico, the word chirimoya is used.)
As far as I can discern, the word chermoya is a mispelling of a mispelling. One website writer trying to reason his way through this mess seems to think that a chermoya tree has cherimoya fruit! I think that cherimoya is mispelled as chermoya because in many fonts the “i” in cherimoya is difficult to see next to the “m”. Perhaps we might spell better if we rely on fonts that are easy to read. (I bet Chermoya is going to morph into chermova some day.)