Did you know that "The banana tree cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man.

  The reason the bananas we eat don’t have seeds is that
they are all sterile. A long time ago the Cavendish bananas
first came into being when a tetraploid banana (that is a
plant that has four copies of every chromosome instead of
the normal two) mated with a normal diploid banana. The
result, a banana with three copies of every chromosome
couldn’t mate or produce seeds. One of the steps in making
reproductive cells (the analog of human sperm and egg
cells) is the even dividing of a plant’s chromosomes into
two reproductive cells.* Normal diploid cells can easily
divide into two cells (one copy of each chromosome in
each cell), tetraploid plants can divide the same way (two
copies of each chromosome in each cell). Hexaploid, three
copies in each and so on. Odd numbers of chromosomes
don’t work. The plants can’t successfully make the cells it
needs to reproduce, if it can’t reproduce it can’t make
seeds, and that is why bananas (or seedless watermelons)
don’t have seeds.
Every banana has been propagated vegetatively**, making
all the bananas of the same type clones (all the bananas
available in most grocery stores are a single breed, the
Cavendish). The identical genetics of bananas means
quality is very consistent, the downside is the sterility of the
plants makes them easy targets for diseases and parasites
and means the hands of plant breeders, the people who
normally breed forms of disease resistance traits into crops,
are tied. A plant breeder can’t breed a plant that doesn’t
sexually reproduce.
                       #worldfacts21

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