Farmers want $3.1 million sex change
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An effort is underway to perform sex changes on papayas. That's right -- the large, yellowish fruit.
Papayas, it turns out, have not just one but three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite. The third produces the yummy fruit, but the male and females are mostly useless to farmers.
University of Illinois plant biology professor Ray Ming has secured a $3.1-million grant from the National Science Foundation to change the papayas' sex in an effort to grow only plants that produce hermaphrodite offspring. Currently, farmers don't know which plants are hermaphrodite until the plants have grown and flowered -- meaning they must spend money growing more plants than they can use.
