![]() As the DNA content of the cell increases, so does the size of the cell. “In plants,” Allen says, “the benefit of polyploidy is usually a larger plant or fruit. Polyploidy also frequently increases yield. Botanists induce polyploidy in plants to produce many varieties of seedless fruits, like bananas, grapes, and watermelon. Einkorn wheat, one of the oldest varieties, is a normal, diploid plant, while durum, or macaroni wheat, is tetraploid, and common wheat, or bread wheat, is hexaploid. In fact, the characteristics of some of the world’s most important crops may derive from the fact that different varieties may have different numbers of chromosomes. On the other hand, many plants, like blueberries and some redwoods, are naturally polyploid, and agricultural hybridization has induced polyploidy in many others. ![]() In humans, for example, polyploidy is a usually fatal condition (although some specialized somatic cells, like heart muscle and the smooth muscle lining our arteries, are sometimes polyploid). Polyploidy-having more than two sets of chromosomes-is relatively rare in animals, largely restricted to invertebrates and a few amphibians and fishes. That’s because induced triploidy had already proven effective at increasing yields in other organisms. “I was working with salmon, trying to do basically the same thing with salmon as we later with did oysters-make triploids.” “It was very early on in my graduate school career,” Allen says. The idea, at the time, was to develop products that would bolster Maine’s then nascent aquaculture industry. The first time Allen invented triploid oysters was in the late 1970s, when he was still a masters student at the University of Maine’s Ira Darling Marine Center. Oyster seed pallets in Samish Bay (Taylor Shellfish) That means they can be harvested earlier, before they’re affected by the diseases that have laid waste to natural oyster populations in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the estuaries of Normandy. The uneven number results in a mostly infertile oyster that, because it doesn’t waste energy producing gametes-eggs and sperm-grows bigger and faster than natural oysters. Allen’s innovation has been to create oysters with three sets of chromosomes. Natural oysters, like humans and most other eukaryotes, are diploid-each of their cells contains two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. His monster: a sweet, plump morsel called the triploid oyster. Over the past three decades, Allen’s patented innovations in oyster culture have transformed this old-fashioned industry. ![]() Frankenstein, in this case, is Standish Allen, currently the director of the Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute for Marine Science. Not monsters in the pejorative sense, but man made creatures-the invention of a modern-day Dr. If you slurped down any oysters on the half-shell this summer, you probably didn’t realize they were monsters. ![]()
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