Lychee and longan experts at the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences have recently revealed that they have solved planting conundrums for a lychee species that mainly grows in South China's Hainan Province. This species has no seeds at all.
Gao Zhaoyin, leading expert on the research team, stated that there are two seedless lychee varieties - the A4 and Nandao - that are unique to China. Though the first seedless lychee was bred in 1997, planting and growing more remained a challenging task for scientists, which resulted in the public ignoring the new fruit due to its rarity and high prices.
Two main planting problems have been solved. The first was breeding varieties with more stable flower formation to better allow the formation of fruit. The second was altering the thickness of the fruit's stem and skin, which prevents it from dropping too quickly from the tree after ripening.
Source: globaltimes.cn