Apomixis in crop plants has been the target of worldwide research for over 30 years, because it can make hybrid seed production can become accessible to everyone,” Sundaresan said. “The resulting increase in yields can help meet global needs of an increasing population without having to increase use of land, water and fertilizers to unsustainable levels.” Once you have the hybrid, if you can induce apomixis, then you can plant it every year,” Khush said.

The word breedable is ingrained in misogyny both online and offline, but a complex one in fanfiction circles, which are largely populated by queer writers and readers. Online, people will pair a steamy thirst trap with a caption calling themselves breedable, or point out a (real or fictional) man's attractiveness by commenting on their "fertile" qualities. The lighthearted degradation is inherently sexual. The Omegaverse fanfiction that catalyzed the spread of "breedable" as a meme provides platforms to discuss consent and power dynamics within relationships. In a 2017 paper written for the Digital Cultures Research Center at the University of West England, Milena Popova analyzed three Omegaverse fics to exemplify the ways partners with innately less power may communicate (or not communicate) their non-consent to sexual activity, and the discussions that followed the fics' publications. Popova wrote that the fics "clearly problematize issues of power and consent" and more importantly, "offer ways of negotiating meaningful, consensual intimate relationships within wider abusive social structures."The method would allow seed companies to produce hybrid seeds more rapidly and at larger scale, as well as providing seed that farmers could save and replant from season to season, Khush said. The phrase "submissive and breedable" stems from a June tweet that reads, "normalize platonically telling your bros they look submissive and breedable," per Know Your Meme. The freedom given to participants of reading or writing any gender identity, sexual orientation, or sexual act that they wish, without worrying about the real-world consequences of such actions, is a powerful draw," Mixer concluded. "While it is beyond the scope of this study to state whether this form of sexually explicit material is or is not harmful, the data suggest that many young adults, queer or not, find themselves in it."

However, transferring apomixis to a major crop plant has proved difficult to achieve. 1 step to cloned hybrid seeds Works on Archive of Our Own are overwhelmingly tagged for male-male relationships. Credit: Courtesy of Yvonne Gonzales One solution to this would be to propagate hybrids as clones that would remain identical from generation to generation without further breeding. Many wild plants can produce seeds that are clones of themselves, a process called apomixis. Sundaresan, Khanday and colleagues in France, Germany and Ghana have now achieved a clonal efficiency of 95%, using a commercial hybrid rice strain, and shown that the process could be sustained for at least three generations. The single-step process involves modifying three genes called MiMe which cause the plant to switch from meioisis, the process that plants use to form egg cells, to mitosis, in which a cell divides into two copies of itself. Another gene modification induces apomixis. The result is a seed that can grow into a plant genetically identical to its parent.

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Khush recalled that he organized a 1994 conference on apomixis in rice breeding. When he returned to UC Davis in 2002, he gave a copy of the conference proceedings to Sundaresan. There is no hidden meaning in this phrasing. This isn't youthful slang that older generations will have to Google to understand, though the word's explicit nature may incite another round of fear-mongering articles failing to decode what teens are texting each other. When people refer to themselves or others as breedable, they literally mean so hot; they'd like to procreate. And while many Omegaverse fanfictions revolve around cis men falling in love with other cis men, most fanfiction overall is not written by cis men. Modern fandom culture was born from female Star Trek fans, and is now carried by queer fan bases. In a 2018 Masters in Sociology thesis presented to Humboldt State University, Lindsay Mixer analyzed how fanfiction influenced sexual development in young adults. Of Mixer's 1,368 survey respondents who identified as "fanfiction participants," 73.9 percent identified as female, 6.5 percent identified as male, and 16.9 percent identified as nonbinary. Only 17.2 percent of fanfiction participants identified as heterosexual. With access to reproductive healthcare and abortions threatened in the U.S. by restrictive conservative measures, morality and medical care are inextricably linked in pop culture. The Handmaid's Tale's red cloaks and starched white bonnets — distinguishing the show's protagonists as enslaved women who were forced to bear children for the aristocracy — are now symbols of resistance against policies restricting birth control and abortion access. The show, based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, take the concept of "breedability" to a horrifying, dystopian extreme. The phrase "submissive and breedable" comes from another copypasta, which circulated online after a TikTok user captioned their video, "feelin petite right now maybe a lil vulnerable in this cardigan, perhaps breedable." The now-deleted TikTok, which appears to be from a deactivated account that went by the name yeahthataintme, was posted as early as March 2021.