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A new international study has made a groundbreaking discovery: sunflowers can form viable seeds without pollination or fertilization, through a process called parthenogenesis. Published in Nature, the research reveals that under specific conditions, sunflower plants can produce haploid seeds—those containing only maternal DNA—opening up a previously unknown reproductive pathway in this major crop.Parthenogenesis is rare in flowering plants. Yet researchers found that sunflower seeds could develop in the complete absence of pollen. These haploid embryos bypassed the usual need for endosperm, the tissue that typically nourishes the embryo. Instead, cotyledons provided the nutrients necessary for germination. This is an exceptional finding in plant biology.The team experimented with light intensity, temperature, and hormone treatments, observing that high light levels significantly improved haploid seed yield. In some genetic backgrounds, pairing maize pollen with boron also boosted success. Notably, chemical treatments like phospholipase inhibitors triggered spontaneous parthenogenesis, producing small but viable seeds even when no pollen was present.To make these haploid seeds fertile, scientists used tissue culture and chromosome doubling. The resulting plants were fully fertile, producing up to 188 seeds each. This sets the stage for a scalable, doubled haploid breeding system that could reduce the time needed to develop inbred sunflower lines from six years to just ten months.This discovery could revolutionize sunflower breeding. As sunflowers produced nearly 55 million metric tons globally in 2023, the ability to accelerate breeding programs promises improved yields, greater sustainability, and faster development of elite hybrids worldwide.Follow @science__sphere for regular scientific updates!RESEARCH PAPER 📄Timothy Kelliher, "Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction", Nature (2025).