Growing Fruit Without Plants: My Mission.
Lucas van der Zee, a horticulture and product physiologist at Wageningen University, is researching the possibility of growing fruit without the plant. His PhD research involves collecting immature fruit or flowers from tomato plants and growing the stems into healthy, high-quality tomatoes in the lab. Ultimately, the aim is to produce fruit from tomato meristem cells and skip using a plant entirely. This could be done indoors, which might help return some agricultural land to nature. The sustainability of this method will be assessed as part of the PhD programme.