There are seedless grapes, seedless oranges and seedless watermelons. Is anyone working on making other seedless fruits? Like say, cherries or peaches? Imagine a world where you wouldn’t have to deal with pits in fruits such as plums or apricots?
Is there a difference between a seed and a pit that makes it more difficult to cultivate a seedless cherry tree? Or do we have to wait until some freak of nature comes along and then clone it?
Just a WAG - I don’t know enough botany to do more - but I suspect the difference has to do with how, on the one hand, you have seeds distributed throughout the fruit, where on the other hand, you have one big seed around which the fruit grows. I don’t know, but perhaps the seed is acting as a kind of scaffold for the fruit.
Yes. I think all of the seedless fruits we have at the moment are berries (yes, oranges and watermelons are berries) - and these can be made to form even when there are no seeds, or in some cases, do so regardless naturally.
Drupes (including stone fruits such as cherries, plums, peaches) are a whole different form of fruit that develop in a different way - I suspect that development is more dependent on the presence of the stone.
There are varieties of peach that have donut-shaped flesh surrounding a very small stone - I reckon that’s as close as you can get.
And yes, there are people working on seedless fruits and other vegetables. Monsanto for example is doing a lot of research on that field and getting a lot of flak regarding their linked marketing practices.
The traditional research method is based on noticing that a cultivar (a variety) of fruit is likely to have less seeds than others, and selecting for that trait. The problem then is that, if the cultivar is really grown as a whole plant, you still need some seeds to be able t grow it (some fruits are always grown as grafts, no seeds required).