RESEARCH STARTER

Fruit crops

Fruit crops are plants cultivated for their edible fruits, which develop from the fertilization of ovules and the subsequent hormone production that triggers fruit development. Typically containing seeds, fruits can also arise without fertilization through processes like parthenogenesis, and some fruits, such as seedless varieties, can develop through parthenocarpy. The classification of fruits versus vegetables can often be ambiguous, as many fruits are consumed in savory dishes.

Fruits are a significant part of human agriculture, with many fleshy varieties having been domesticated over thousands of years for better yield and quality. Notable temperate fruits include apples, pears, and strawberries, while tropical fruits encompass oranges, bananas, and mangoes. Each of these fruits possesses unique qualities and cultivation methods, often influenced by their historical and geographical development. For example, apples, domesticated from wild varieties in Asia, are now the most widely grown fruit in the U.S., while bananas, initially native to Asia, became a key crop globally in the twentieth century.

Fruits also play an ecological role, often serving as rewards for animals that aid in seed dispersal. Understanding the diverse types and cultivation practices of fruit crops can enhance appreciation for their nutritional value and cultural significance in various cuisines around the world.

Full Article

  • Categories: Agriculture; economic botany and plant uses; food

Fertilization of ovules and the initiation of seed development lead to hormone production that triggers fruit development. Consequently, fruits usually contain seeds, but seeds can form without fertilization (parthenogenesis), and fruits can develop without seeds (parthenocarpy). Many fruits that are cooked or eaten as part of a main course are usually classed as vegetables. This dichotomy is reflected in the origins of the two words: fruit, from the Latin fruor, “to enjoy,” and vegetable, from the Latin vegetare, “to enliven.”

Ecology of Fruits

In nature, fleshy fruits serve as a reward for seed-dispersing animals. In keeping with the evolutionary principle that selection tends to minimize the cost of structures while maximizing their function, the flesh of these fruits contains comparatively few calories and primarily consists of colored, flavored sugar water. Using animals as dispersal agents carries a risk, however, of seed destruction. Consequently, fleshy fruits that are dispersed by animals exhibit a number of mechanisms that protect seeds. One of these is the production of a large, hard seed that an animal cannot eat, such as a peach pit or a mango seed. Another protective characteristic is small seeds that go through an animal’s digestive system without being crushed or digested, such as strawberry seeds. Over the last ten thousand years that humans have been practicing agriculture, many fleshy-fruited species have been domesticated and bred for improved fruit production and quality. To further refine these crops, research conducted in 2023 by the American Society of Plant Biologists utilizes genetic and physiological approaches to enhance yield, quality, and climate resilience.

Several of the most marketed fruits worldwide are discussed below.

Temperate Fruits

The rose family (Rosaceae) contains a wide array of fruits grown in the cool regions of the world: apples, pears, plums, peaches, cherries, strawberries, and raspberries. Apples are among the most important fruit tree crop of temperate regions, widely cultivated for fresh consumption and processing. Apple and pear fruits are known as pomes because the edible fleshy part of the fruit is a combination of the outer ovary wall and the basal part of the flower. Cultivated apples are believed to have originated in western Asia and were enjoyed in prehistoric times. Apples were brought to North America the seventeenth century and are now among the most widely grown fruit in the United States. Most of the apples grown today are diploids, but many are triploids. Orchards are usually planted with grafted trees, to ensure uniformity of the crop. Literally thousands of varieties of apples have been developed over the centuries since the species was domesticated.

Plums, peaches, and cherries come from different species of the genus Prunus. They share a fruit type known as a drupe, consisting of a fleshy mesocarp and a single seed inside a hard endocarp. While there are native species of Prunus in the New World, the domesticated species are native to Eurasia.

The modern cultivated strawberry is a hybrid that apparently formed spontaneously in a European garden between a species of Fragaria from Chile and one from Virginia. Europeans had eaten native strawberries for centuries before the discovery of the New World, but the hybrid (Fragaria ananassa) was larger, as flavorful, and produced more fruit. A strawberry is actually an aggregation of fruits, or aggregate fruit. Each tiny seed is itself a fruit. The large, succulent mass is the swollen top of the stem on which the flower was borne. Raspberries are also aggregated fruits, but each globular segment of the raspberry is itself a fruit, called a drupelet. The caps of drupelets pull free of the stem tips when the berry is picked.

Grapes are among the most widely cultivated fleshy fruits globally, valued for fresh consumption and processed products (on a tonnage-produced basis). However, the majority of grapes are not eaten as fruit but are turned into other foods, such as vinegar, liqueurs, raisins, and wine. The most widely cultivated species of grape is Vitis vinifera (Vitaceae), a woody perennial vine native to middle Asia. There are hundreds of varieties of grapes that vary in the color of the skin, flesh, flavor, and sweetness of the berries.

Nuts are dry fruits, each of which contains a single seed that is free inside the ovary wall, except for an attachment at one end called the funiculus. The pericarp (the walls of the ovary) is hard and fibrous. Commercially grown nuts include filberts, pecans, walnuts, and macadamia nuts, sold both for eating and for cooking.

Tropical Fruits

Many species of the genus Citrus (including sweet orange, tangerine, grapefruit, lemon, and lime) are grown for their edible fruits. Sweet oranges (Citrus sinensis) are among the most widely grown fruits in the world, but in the nineteenth century they were considered luxuries and prescribed as cold remedies by physicians. Like other citrus fruits, the fruit of an orange is technically a hesperidium, a berry with a leathery rind and a juicy pulp that is formed of juice sacks borne on the inner layer of the fruit wall. The juice sacks fill the sections of the fruit and surround the seeds. The watery solution in the sacks is high in vitamin C. There are three main classes of oranges: Valencias, navels, and blood oranges. Valencias, with their deep orange color and rich flavor, are the source of most orange juice. Navel oranges, favored for eating, are the result of a mutation that produces a second ovary-like structure (the navel) instead of seeds. Because they are seedless, navel oranges are all propagated by grafting. Blood oranges are seeded oranges named for the patches of deep red-purple color in the fruit. To protect these crops, researchers at the University of Florida (UF/IFAS) developed and tested new citrus varieties in 2025 that show tolerance to citrus greening disease, aiming to restore fruit yield and quality in affected regions.

Bananas became a major fruit crop in the twentieth century; prior to the use of refrigerated ships, bananas spoiled before they could reach markets outside the tropics. Wild bananas, native to eastern Asia, have seeds, but the common domesticated banana (Musa paradisiaca) is seedless and is the product of several cycles of hybridization followed by increases in chromosome number. Whether the fruit will be a tender and sweet yellow or red or a tough, starchy green plantain depends on the particular combination of chromosomes in the hybrid. Banana plants are giant herbs, not trees, and are propagated vegetatively by planting a piece of stem. Over the course of a year, the stem grows and produces a long terminal inflorescence of many clusters of female flowers along the flowering stalk and male flowers at the tip. The female flowers spontaneously mature, with each cluster forming a hand, or bunch, of bananas. An entire inflorescence can produce more than three hundred bananas, weighing 110 pounds. After fruiting, the shoot dies and is cut, allowing a sprout from the base to produce the next flowering stem. Modern advancements continue to refine this crop; in 2025, the Norwich-based biotech company Tropic developed gene-edited bananas that resist browning for at least 12 hours after peeling. Aimed at reducing food waste, this breakthrough was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.

Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are extremely common and important fruits in tropical areas, particularly in their native region of Southeast Asia, where the fruit pulp and even the seeds have been used for food. Mangoes are borne on trees that can grow only within tropical regions where there is adequate water in the summer. The fruit is a berry with musky yellow flesh surrounding a single large seed. Mangoes belong to the poison ivy family (the Anacardiaceae family); some people are allergic to the latex produced in the skins. Mangoes were introduced into Brazil by the Portuguese in the early 1700’s and subsequently spread to other areas of the New World tropics.

Melons, both common melons (Cucumis melo) and watermelons (Citrullus lanatus) belong to the same family (Cucurbitaceae) as squashes, but the latter are all native to the New World and the former to the Old World. All these species share the same kind of fruit, a pepo, which consists of a hard rind derived in part from the basal parts of the flower and an edible fleshy layer of inner ovary tissue. Melons are monoecious vines with showy male and female flowers that require pollination to set fruit. Melons are native to Africa, where they were undoubtedly prized for their high water content and fresh flavor. Selection has led to numerous varieties, including cantaloupe, Crenshaw, honeydew, Persian, musk, and a variety of other melons that differ in the color and surface of the rind, color of the flesh, taste, and degree of sweetness.

Watermelons are native to sub-Saharan Africa, but they can be grown in temperate regions because they are annuals. The flesh is 90–91 percent water and is acidic enough to curdle milk. Recently, seedless types have been produced by artificially making triploid plants. The pollen of these triploids is sterile, and the seeds abort early. Farmers plant the triploids with fertile diploids. Pollen from the diploids fertilizes the ovules of the triploids and triggers fruit production. The seeds quickly die, but the fruit continues to mature into a seedless watermelon.


Bibliography

Carrington, Damian. “Gene-Edited Non-Browning Banana Could Cut Food Waste, Scientists Say.” The Guardian, 7 Mar. 2025, www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/07/gene-edited-non-browning-banana-cut-food-waste-tropic-norwich. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Bananas.” Markets and Trade, FAO, 2025, www.fao.org/markets-and-trade/commodities-overview/bananas-tropical-fruits/bananas/en. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Morton, Julia F. Fruits of Warm Climates. Creative Resource Systems, 1987.

Simpson, B. B., and M. C. Ogorzaly. Economic Botany: Plants of Our World. 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Smartt, J., and N. W. Simmonds, editors. Evolution of Crop Plants. 2nd ed., Longman Scientific and Technical, 1995.

University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). “UF/IFAS Breeders Release Six New Citrus Greening-Tolerant Varieties to Help Growers Battle HLB.” UF/IFAS News, 16 Apr. 2025, blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/news/2025/04/16/uf-ifas-breeders-release-six-new-citrus-greening-tolerant-varieties-help-growers-battle-hlb/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Wu, Jun, et al. “Focus on Fruit Crops.” Plant Physiology, vol. 192, no. 3, July 2023, pp. 1659–65, doi:10.1093/plphys/kiad259. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Full Article

  • Categories: Agriculture; economic botany and plant uses; food

Fertilization of ovules and the initiation of seed development lead to hormone production that triggers fruit development. Consequently, fruits usually contain seeds, but seeds can form without fertilization (parthenogenesis), and fruits can develop without seeds (parthenocarpy). Many fruits that are cooked or eaten as part of a main course are usually classed as vegetables. This dichotomy is reflected in the origins of the two words: fruit, from the Latin fruor, “to enjoy,” and vegetable, from the Latin vegetare, “to enliven.”

Ecology of Fruits

In nature, fleshy fruits serve as a reward for seed-dispersing animals. In keeping with the evolutionary principle that selection tends to minimize the cost of structures while maximizing their function, the flesh of these fruits contains comparatively few calories and primarily consists of colored, flavored sugar water. Using animals as dispersal agents carries a risk, however, of seed destruction. Consequently, fleshy fruits that are dispersed by animals exhibit a number of mechanisms that protect seeds. One of these is the production of a large, hard seed that an animal cannot eat, such as a peach pit or a mango seed. Another protective characteristic is small seeds that go through an animal’s digestive system without being crushed or digested, such as strawberry seeds. Over the last ten thousand years that humans have been practicing agriculture, many fleshy-fruited species have been domesticated and bred for improved fruit production and quality. To further refine these crops, research conducted in 2023 by the American Society of Plant Biologists utilizes genetic and physiological approaches to enhance yield, quality, and climate resilience.

Several of the most marketed fruits worldwide are discussed below.

Temperate Fruits

The rose family (Rosaceae) contains a wide array of fruits grown in the cool regions of the world: apples, pears, plums, peaches, cherries, strawberries, and raspberries. Apples are among the most important fruit tree crop of temperate regions, widely cultivated for fresh consumption and processing. Apple and pear fruits are known as pomes because the edible fleshy part of the fruit is a combination of the outer ovary wall and the basal part of the flower. Cultivated apples are believed to have originated in western Asia and were enjoyed in prehistoric times. Apples were brought to North America the seventeenth century and are now among the most widely grown fruit in the United States. Most of the apples grown today are diploids, but many are triploids. Orchards are usually planted with grafted trees, to ensure uniformity of the crop. Literally thousands of varieties of apples have been developed over the centuries since the species was domesticated.

Plums, peaches, and cherries come from different species of the genus Prunus. They share a fruit type known as a drupe, consisting of a fleshy mesocarp and a single seed inside a hard endocarp. While there are native species of Prunus in the New World, the domesticated species are native to Eurasia.

The modern cultivated strawberry is a hybrid that apparently formed spontaneously in a European garden between a species of Fragaria from Chile and one from Virginia. Europeans had eaten native strawberries for centuries before the discovery of the New World, but the hybrid (Fragaria ananassa) was larger, as flavorful, and produced more fruit. A strawberry is actually an aggregation of fruits, or aggregate fruit. Each tiny seed is itself a fruit. The large, succulent mass is the swollen top of the stem on which the flower was borne. Raspberries are also aggregated fruits, but each globular segment of the raspberry is itself a fruit, called a drupelet. The caps of drupelets pull free of the stem tips when the berry is picked.

Grapes are among the most widely cultivated fleshy fruits globally, valued for fresh consumption and processed products (on a tonnage-produced basis). However, the majority of grapes are not eaten as fruit but are turned into other foods, such as vinegar, liqueurs, raisins, and wine. The most widely cultivated species of grape is Vitis vinifera (Vitaceae), a woody perennial vine native to middle Asia. There are hundreds of varieties of grapes that vary in the color of the skin, flesh, flavor, and sweetness of the berries.

Nuts are dry fruits, each of which contains a single seed that is free inside the ovary wall, except for an attachment at one end called the funiculus. The pericarp (the walls of the ovary) is hard and fibrous. Commercially grown nuts include filberts, pecans, walnuts, and macadamia nuts, sold both for eating and for cooking.

Tropical Fruits

Many species of the genus Citrus (including sweet orange, tangerine, grapefruit, lemon, and lime) are grown for their edible fruits. Sweet oranges (Citrus sinensis) are among the most widely grown fruits in the world, but in the nineteenth century they were considered luxuries and prescribed as cold remedies by physicians. Like other citrus fruits, the fruit of an orange is technically a hesperidium, a berry with a leathery rind and a juicy pulp that is formed of juice sacks borne on the inner layer of the fruit wall. The juice sacks fill the sections of the fruit and surround the seeds. The watery solution in the sacks is high in vitamin C. There are three main classes of oranges: Valencias, navels, and blood oranges. Valencias, with their deep orange color and rich flavor, are the source of most orange juice. Navel oranges, favored for eating, are the result of a mutation that produces a second ovary-like structure (the navel) instead of seeds. Because they are seedless, navel oranges are all propagated by grafting. Blood oranges are seeded oranges named for the patches of deep red-purple color in the fruit. To protect these crops, researchers at the University of Florida (UF/IFAS) developed and tested new citrus varieties in 2025 that show tolerance to citrus greening disease, aiming to restore fruit yield and quality in affected regions.

Bananas became a major fruit crop in the twentieth century; prior to the use of refrigerated ships, bananas spoiled before they could reach markets outside the tropics. Wild bananas, native to eastern Asia, have seeds, but the common domesticated banana (Musa paradisiaca) is seedless and is the product of several cycles of hybridization followed by increases in chromosome number. Whether the fruit will be a tender and sweet yellow or red or a tough, starchy green plantain depends on the particular combination of chromosomes in the hybrid. Banana plants are giant herbs, not trees, and are propagated vegetatively by planting a piece of stem. Over the course of a year, the stem grows and produces a long terminal inflorescence of many clusters of female flowers along the flowering stalk and male flowers at the tip. The female flowers spontaneously mature, with each cluster forming a hand, or bunch, of bananas. An entire inflorescence can produce more than three hundred bananas, weighing 110 pounds. After fruiting, the shoot dies and is cut, allowing a sprout from the base to produce the next flowering stem. Modern advancements continue to refine this crop; in 2025, the Norwich-based biotech company Tropic developed gene-edited bananas that resist browning for at least 12 hours after peeling. Aimed at reducing food waste, this breakthrough was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.

Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are extremely common and important fruits in tropical areas, particularly in their native region of Southeast Asia, where the fruit pulp and even the seeds have been used for food. Mangoes are borne on trees that can grow only within tropical regions where there is adequate water in the summer. The fruit is a berry with musky yellow flesh surrounding a single large seed. Mangoes belong to the poison ivy family (the Anacardiaceae family); some people are allergic to the latex produced in the skins. Mangoes were introduced into Brazil by the Portuguese in the early 1700’s and subsequently spread to other areas of the New World tropics.

Melons, both common melons (Cucumis melo) and watermelons (Citrullus lanatus) belong to the same family (Cucurbitaceae) as squashes, but the latter are all native to the New World and the former to the Old World. All these species share the same kind of fruit, a pepo, which consists of a hard rind derived in part from the basal parts of the flower and an edible fleshy layer of inner ovary tissue. Melons are monoecious vines with showy male and female flowers that require pollination to set fruit. Melons are native to Africa, where they were undoubtedly prized for their high water content and fresh flavor. Selection has led to numerous varieties, including cantaloupe, Crenshaw, honeydew, Persian, musk, and a variety of other melons that differ in the color and surface of the rind, color of the flesh, taste, and degree of sweetness.

Watermelons are native to sub-Saharan Africa, but they can be grown in temperate regions because they are annuals. The flesh is 90–91 percent water and is acidic enough to curdle milk. Recently, seedless types have been produced by artificially making triploid plants. The pollen of these triploids is sterile, and the seeds abort early. Farmers plant the triploids with fertile diploids. Pollen from the diploids fertilizes the ovules of the triploids and triggers fruit production. The seeds quickly die, but the fruit continues to mature into a seedless watermelon.


Bibliography

Carrington, Damian. “Gene-Edited Non-Browning Banana Could Cut Food Waste, Scientists Say.” The Guardian, 7 Mar. 2025, www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/07/gene-edited-non-browning-banana-cut-food-waste-tropic-norwich. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Bananas.” Markets and Trade, FAO, 2025, www.fao.org/markets-and-trade/commodities-overview/bananas-tropical-fruits/bananas/en. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Morton, Julia F. Fruits of Warm Climates. Creative Resource Systems, 1987.

Simpson, B. B., and M. C. Ogorzaly. Economic Botany: Plants of Our World. 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Smartt, J., and N. W. Simmonds, editors. Evolution of Crop Plants. 2nd ed., Longman Scientific and Technical, 1995.

University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). “UF/IFAS Breeders Release Six New Citrus Greening-Tolerant Varieties to Help Growers Battle HLB.” UF/IFAS News, 16 Apr. 2025, blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/news/2025/04/16/uf-ifas-breeders-release-six-new-citrus-greening-tolerant-varieties-help-growers-battle-hlb/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Wu, Jun, et al. “Focus on Fruit Crops.” Plant Physiology, vol. 192, no. 3, July 2023, pp. 1659–65, doi:10.1093/plphys/kiad259. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

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