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Originally Posted by jeffreyp
it is possible to get seeds absolutely and here's a good article below. Gabe, my understanding was bananas were sterile and seedless because one set of chromosomes (A or B) has no homologous set to pair up with during synapsis of meiosis?
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Yes, that is a commonly perpetuated myth about bananas, even among otherwise reputable resources. It is easy to say that they are seedless because they are triploid, but it just isn't true, at least in the case of bananas. The way they are able to still breed is partly by the creation of unreduced gametes, so instead of trying to divide 3 in half, it just keeps it as 3 and with another haploid gamete thrown in the mix you can create tetraploids. Triploids likewise can be produced by crossing a normal diploid (with haploid gametes) with a diploid which produces unreduced (2n) gametes, or by crossing a normal reducing diploid with a normal reducing tetraploid. However, as is often the case with bananas, even that is not so simple sometimes, and in practice when doing banana breeding, everything from 2n to 4n (and beyond soemtimes) can be produced from nearly any cross involving a parthenocarpic plant, there are still some mysteries of exactly how meiosis works in edible bananas in some cases.