![]() Unlike the heirlooms mentioned above, most people find that ‘Sweet Seedless’ is 100% seedless or very close to it. This appears to be an F1 hybrid but the details of the parents have not been made public. The First Seedless Tomatoīurpee introduced a tomato called ‘Sweet Seedless’ around 2004 and they claim that it is the first seedless tomato. Some of the varieties in this group include, ‘Oregon Spring’, ‘Santiam’, and ‘Siletz’. So selecting for fruit development in cool conditions indirectly selects for seedlessness. Fruits develop as soon as flowers are formed. What is the connection between producing fruit in cold climates and being seedless? One of the consequences of parthenocarpy is that fruit development does not need to wait until warm temperatures for proper fertilization. His work in tomatoes resulted in several almost seedless tomatoes. James Baggett from Oregon State University did a lot of work to develop new varieties of vegetables that produced earlier in the cool Oregon climate. Not everyone reports low seed count for these varieties.ĭr. In my casual reading, it seems as if the actual seed count depends on where the plants are grown, and maybe even the purity of the seed line. The following are some of the cultivars that claim to have few seeds. Over the years people also found other types of tomatoes with few seeds and preserved them as well. In the process they have also selected for a low seed count. Over many years people have selected a tomato that is very fleshy and dry. These varieties produce a small number of seeds but are not really seedless. Low seed tomatoes have been around for a long time and many of these are heirloom tomatoes. In tomatoes, one such mutation increases the auxin level so that fruit is produced with no fertilization. Such plants have one or more mutations that allow fruit to develop even if there is no fertilization. There is another condition in plants called parthenocarpy. A mix of both diploids and tetraploid tomatoes would be mostly self pollinated producing few seedless triploid fruits. This explains why different heirlooms can be grown quite close together without contaminating the lines. This may work well for watermelons, but most tomato flowers are fertilized with their own pollen, either by bumble bees or by wind. The seeds just get in the way of processing the fruit and producing seedless juice. The tomato juice and ketchup industry would benefit from using seedless tomatoes. ![]() I found no medical reason why anyone would benefit from seedless tomatoes. Some people have trouble digesting tomatoes, or are allergic to them, but this is the whole tomato, not just the seeds. ![]() The medical references I found suggest that there is no evidence seeds cause this problem, ( also this reference and this one that explains diverticular disease well). ![]() Many sites about tomatoes suggest that some people can’t eat the seeds because of a condition called diverticular disease, were seeds get stuck in the folds of the intestine. When I first discovered seedless tomatoes I thought it was just another useless product, but there are some good reasons to have them and also some health myths we need to debug. Ketchup manufacturers would love seedless tomatoes ![]()
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