Research centre comes up with seedless orange :

A new seedless orange has been developed by the National Research Centre for Citrus (NRCC), Nagpur.

“There has been a demand for seedless oranges for many years. We have been working on the project for a few years now,” NRCC Director M S Ladaniya told The Sunday Express.

Named NRCC Nagpur mandarin seedless-4, it was developed by selecting a plant from the orange (Nagpur mandarin) crop that had, by genetic mutation, seedless fruits.

“Worldwide, the trend is to have seedless fruits for easier consumption. Many orange growing countries developed their own seedless oranges. Countries like Israel, Spain, Japan and China have their seedless variety of oranges. The seedless-4 variety has yield potential of 27.15 tonne per hectare. Tests have shown that it produces about 98 kg fruits per plant at plant age of 10-15 years,” Ladaniya said.

While a normal orange has an average of 12.68 seeds, the new variety has only 2.57 seeds per fruit. “This has been demonstrated by a nine year field data,” Ladaniya added.

This year, about 2000 plants of the new seedless variety were produced and distributed to progressive farmers, nursery men, government departments and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVK) across the country, according to Ladaniya.

“This seedless variety is already planted at Warud and Paratwada area of Maharashtra in farmers’ field at 4 locations for demonstration,” he added.
The seedless variety has bigger fruit, high yield (679 fruits/plant), medium large plant growth, deep orange colour fruit at ripening, sweet, good flavour and juicy, fruit weight of 145.9 gram, fruit size 61.61 X 70.23 mm, peel thickness 3.24 mm, number of segment per fruit 10.02, TSS 10.44, acidity 0.72 pc, juice 46.06 pc.

The Nagpur mandarin variety with seeds yields 520 fruits per year per plant.

Source : Indian Express