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BookmarkIn botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary, together with seeds, of a flowering plant.
In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and surrounding tissues.
Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds.
In cuisine, when discussing fruit as food, the term usually refers to just those plant fruits that are sweet and fleshy, examples of which include plum, apple and orange.
However, a great many common vegetables, as well as nuts and grains, are the fruit of the plant species they come from.Many foods are botanically fruit but are treated as vegetables in cooking.
These include cucurbits (e.g., squash, pumpkin, and cucumber), tomato, aubergine (eggplant), and sweet pepper, spices, such as allspice and chillies. Seedlessness is an important feature of some fruits of commerce.
Commercial cultivars of bananas and pineapples are examples of seedless fruits.
Some cultivars of citrus fruits (especially navel oranges and mandarin oranges), table grapes, grapefruit, and watermelons are valued for their seedlessness.
In some species, seedlessness is the result of parthenocarpy, where fruits set without fertilization.
Parthenocarpic fruit set may or may not require pollination.
Most seedless citrus fruits require a pollination stimulus; bananas and pineapples do not.
Seedlessness in table grapes results from the abortion of the embryonic plant that is produced by fertilization, a phenomenon known as stenospermocarpy which requires normal pollination and fertilization..
For more information about the topic Fruit, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Berry — The berry is the most common type of simple fleshy fruit; one in which the entire ovary wall ripens into an edible ... > read more
Legume — The term legume has two closely related meanings in botany, legume can refer to either the plant itself, or to the edible fruit (or useful part). ... > read more
Nut (fruit) — A nut in botany is a simple dry fruit with one seed (rarely two) in which the ovary wall becomes very hard at maturity, and where the seed remains ... > read more
