Irradiation creates seedless pomelos

On March 21, MSc Nguyen An De, Head of the Department of Breeding and Biotechnology, Center for Research on Fruit Varieties in the Southeast, said that the Center currently owns three varieties of seedless sugar-pomelo pomelo (DLC240). , DLC434 and DLC436). These three grapefruit varieties have yielded from one season to two seasons.

Seedless pomelos are produced by irradiation (Photo: Study).

In order to obtain three seedless pomelo varieties, the Center has put 1,000 branches of pomelos with clean orange leaves on the Dalat nuclear reactor irradiated with cobalt radioactive sources 60 (Co60). After irradiation, 1,000 branches were grafted with 1,000 mother grapefruit trees, then selected superior varieties, the least seeds. From one thousand plants, the Center has selected three varieties with less than five seeds per fruit, but most fruits do not have seeds. According to international standards, in a grapefruit has less than five seeds will reach the seedless standard.

Currently, the Center has registered the research topic to bring these three varieties to a large-scale trial (10ha) in order to re-evaluate the results, before putting the seed to mass farmers.

In fact, many pomelo farmers in Dong Nai and Binh Duong are still producing seedless grapefruit pomelo by spraying growth regulators when pomelo starts the results. However, according to MSc, this method only produces fruits in a certain season and is of an acute nature, does not represent the seedless pomelos. At the present time, the price of seedless pomelos is usually twice as high as that of seeds of the same type.