Papaya sex change in the works

The effort could weed out unproductive male and female plants so that farmers could grow only the fruitful hermaphrodites.


An effort is underway to perform sex changes on papayas. That's right -- the large, yellowish fruit.

Papayas, it turns out, have not just one but three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite. The third produces the yummy fruit, but the male and females are mostly useless to farmers.

University of Illinois plant biology professor Ray Ming has secured a $3.1-million grant from the National Science Foundation to change the papayas' sex in an effort to grow only plants that produce hermaphrodite offspring.

Currently, farmers don't know which plants are hermaphrodite until the plants have grown and flowered -- meaning they must spend money growing more plants than they can use.

If successful, the research will allow papaya growers to save on production costs and use less water and fertilizer. The cost savings could be passed to consumers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...0,7270089.story

This post has been edited by Polaris: Nov 8 2009, 07:55 PM

Fruits has sexes?

sex on fruit? how to do sex?

Sastera stream spotted

+1

papaya + milk is nais....

can also help grow papaya on girls?

wait until they managed to implement the experiment on human

transfer some sort of seeding genes on plants.

cool....

huh?

Great, human eat it and then our genetics will change within few generations

papaya also ayam kambing liao..

Papayas are already so CHEAP and easy to grow, the only people this will possibly benefit are American corporations.

I sastera stream also know.

Strange. The papaya tree outside my house have fruit automatically.