Relationship between Fruit Shape and Seed Yield in Cucurbita pepo

Cucurbita pepo is a very diverse species for fruit shape and size. The domestication of the species started thousands of years ago in North America from native small, round, usually bitter-flesh gourds. The initial use of these gourds by humans appears to have been consumption of the seeds, and thus the first steps of human selection were directed toward increasing fruit and seed size (1, 7). The fruit flesh could be consumed only after several cycles of boiling it to remove the bitter cucurbaticins. Subsequently, variants having non-bitter fruit were selected, resulting in the development of the pumpkins. The first pumpkins may have had a dual usage, for consumption of their seeds and consumption of their immature fruits, just as the landrace pumpkins inly Mexico and Guatemala do today. Later, selection for thicker, more starchy, and less fibrous fruit flesh allowed for consumption of the mature fruits, which today is the common culinary usage of pumpkins in the United States and Canada. The seeds, nonetheless, have some importance in economically developed countries as a high nutritive snack food and in the production of pumpkin seed oil (1, 6).