Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how can there be seedless grapes and how do they reproduce? If you go to a grocery store today and buy grapes, there's a good chance that the only type of grape you can buy is seedless Thompson seedless white grapes, for example, don't have any seeds in them. Nearly all grape vines in production today produce seedless grapes. It turns out that
most fruits today do not come from seeds. They come from cuttings instead. In the case of seedless grapes, a piece of vine is cut off, dipped in rooting hormone, and then placed in moist dirt, so the roots and leaves form. Because they come from cuttings, new grape vines are essentially clones of the vine that they were cut from.
Seedless grapes actually do contain seeds at some point, but a genetic error prevents those seeds from forming a hard outer coat like normal seeds do, so any seeds that do form are just tiny dots inside the fruit, and you don't even know they're there. Someone discovered a plant with this genetic defect and started reproducing it through cut ins. Today's seedless grapes are all descendants from that original error. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
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