Pineapple: History and Origins

No fruit has fallen further in status than the pineapple. It was domesticated by Indigenous peoples of South America — most likely in the Paraná–Paraguay river drainage of southern Brazil and its neighbours — and carried by them, plant by plant, north through the Amazon and the Caribbean until it was growing across a continent and a half before any European saw it. Columbus's crew met it on Guadeloupe in November 1493. Two centuries later it was the most extravagant object in Europe: a fruit that rotted on the voyage and would not grow in a cold climate, so that a single specimen could cost a small fortune, be rented for an evening as a dinner-table centrepiece, be painted, be carved into gateposts and garden follies, and become the standing emblem of hospitality and wealth. Then the pinery hothouses, the steamship, the can, and a Hawaiian plantation industry made it ordinary. This page traces that documented arc — and labels the good stories that are legend as legend.

Table of Contents

  1. A Bromeliad, Not a Tree
  2. Domestication in South America
  3. Carried Across a Continent Before Contact
  4. Guadeloupe, November 1493
  5. Where the Names Come From
  6. European Pineapple Mania
  7. The Pineries
  8. The Hospitality Symbol and Its Legend
  9. James Dole and the Hawaiian Century
  10. The Can That Made It Ordinary
  11. Costa Rica, the Philippines, and MD-2
  12. Research Papers and References
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

A Bromeliad, Not a Tree

Before the history, a correction that clears up most confusion about this plant. Pineapples do not grow on trees. They grow close to the ground on a squat, spiky herbaceous plant with a rosette of stiff, sword-shaped leaves, and a single fruit rises on a short stalk from the centre of that rosette. The plant is roughly knee-high, a field of them looks like a field of oversized aloes, and one plant produces one fruit at a time.

The pineapple belongs to the Bromeliaceae — the bromeliads — a family almost entirely native to the Americas and better known to most people as houseplants and as the air plants that perch on tropical branches. Pineapple is the family's only member of any economic importance as a food.

What we call the fruit is not one fruit. The plant produces a dense spike of small purple flowers, and each of those flowers develops into a small fruit that fuses with its neighbours and with the central stalk into a single body. This is a multiple fruit, and it is why the surface is divided into that grid of hexagonal eyes — each eye is one former flower. The tuft of leaves on top is the continuation of the stem, and it can be twisted off and rooted to grow a new plant.

That last detail runs through the whole history. Pineapples are propagated clonally, from crowns, slips, and suckers, not from seed. The cultivated plant is largely self-incompatible, so a lone variety in a field sets few seeds and the fruit is effectively seedless — which is what people want to eat. It also means a "variety" of pineapple is a clone, potentially propagated unchanged for centuries, and it means every plant carried by a traveller was a living cutting rather than a packet of seed. A 2019 study in Nature Genetics on the Ananas comosus var. bracteatus genome examined pineapple explicitly as a case study in the domestication of clonally propagated crops, which is exactly the right frame for this story.

The plant also uses CAM photosynthesis, a water-saving pathway in which the leaves open their pores at night rather than in the heat of the day. The 2015 pineapple genome paper in Nature Genetics was in fact largely a study of how that pathway evolved. Practically, it is why pineapple tolerates dry, thin, sandy soils that would defeat most fruit crops — and why plantations could be established on ground nobody else wanted.

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Domestication in South America

The pineapple is a South American plant. The genus Ananas is native to the continent, and the wild relatives of the cultivated pineapple — small, seedy, fibrous, sharply acidic fruits that no one would mistake for a supermarket pineapple — still grow there.

The centre of domestication is placed in the region of the Paraná–Paraguay river drainage: southern Brazil and the adjoining parts of Paraguay and northern Argentina, with the surrounding lowlands of the continent's tropical interior as the broader homeland. This is where the wild diversity of the genus concentrates, and diversity of wild relatives is the standard signal botanists use to locate where a crop was taken into cultivation.

The molecular work supports this general picture while showing how tangled the group is. Duval and colleagues, using RFLP markers in Theoretical and Applied Genetics in 2001 and chloroplast DNA restriction-site variation in Genome in 2003, mapped relationships within Ananas and its neighbouring genera and found the boundaries between the named wild forms far less tidy than the older taxonomy suggested. The cultivated pineapple sits inside a continuum of wild and semi-wild American forms rather than descending cleanly from one identifiable ancestor.

Dating the event is genuinely hard, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Fruit does not fossilise; a clonally propagated plant leaves no domestication signature in seed size the way cereals do; and the humid tropics preserve organic remains badly. What can be said with confidence is that domestication happened thousands of years before European contact and that by 1493 the process was long complete — the fruit that astonished Columbus's crew was already a highly selected cultivated plant, large, sweet, and nearly seedless. Precise millennia quoted in popular accounts should be read as estimates.

The selection pressure is easy to read backwards from the result. Indigenous cultivators kept and replanted the crowns of plants whose fruit was largest, sweetest, least acidic, least fibrous, and least seedy. Because propagation is clonal, a single outstanding plant could be multiplied indefinitely and its exact qualities preserved — a far faster and more reliable route to improvement than seed selection. The pineapple is one of the clearest cases of a crop transformed by a people who left no written record of doing it.

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Carried Across a Continent Before Contact

The pineapple did not wait to be discovered. By the time Europeans arrived, it had already been carried by Indigenous peoples from its southern homeland north through the Amazon basin, across the northern coast of South America, up through Central America and into the Caribbean islands — a distribution spanning thousands of kilometres and many distinct societies.

Two features of the plant made this movement easy. A crown or a sucker is a compact, tough, drought-resistant cutting that survives weeks of travel and roots readily; and the plant tolerates poor soil. A pineapple could be carried in a canoe along a river system or between islands and planted at the other end. Tupi-Guarani-speaking peoples of the southern homeland, and Arawak and Carib peoples of the northern coasts and the islands, are the groups most closely associated with its cultivation and spread.

The fruit was not only food. It was used to make fermented drinks, its fibrous leaves yielded strong thread — a use that survives today in the Philippine textile piña, woven from pineapple leaf fibre — and it carried social and ceremonial meaning in the societies that grew it. Planting a spiky, impenetrable hedge of pineapples around a settlement was also a practical defence.

This pre-contact history matters for how the European chapter should be read. Columbus did not find a wild fruit. He found a finished agricultural product, the outcome of a long breeding programme conducted by people whose names are not recorded, and the entire subsequent global career of the pineapple — the hothouses, the plantations, the cans — was built on that inherited work.

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Guadeloupe, November 1493

The European encounter has a date and a place. On 4 November 1493, on the second voyage, Columbus's fleet made landfall at the island the Caribs called Karukera and the Spanish named Guadeloupe. In an abandoned village the landing party found stores of provisions, and among them the fruit.

The earliest surviving European account comes from Diego Álvarez Chanca, the fleet's physician, who wrote a long letter back to the city council of Seville describing the islands, their people, and their plants. Michele da Cuneo, a Savonese gentleman travelling with the fleet, also left a narrative of the voyage. Fuller descriptions followed from chroniclers who worked from the returning accounts: Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, whose De Orbe Novo letters relayed New World news to a European readership, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, whose Historia general y natural de las Indias — its first part published in 1535 — gave one of the earliest European descriptions and illustrations of the plant.

What comes through those texts is astonishment. Europeans had no reference point for the fruit: nothing in the Old World looked like it, and nothing tasted like it. The writers reach for comparisons — to a pine cone for the shape and the armoured surface, to an artichoke, to a melon for the flesh — and to superlatives for the flavour. It was quickly and repeatedly described as the finest fruit anyone had tasted, and that reputation, formed in the 1490s, is the engine of everything that follows.

The Spanish and Portuguese then did to the pineapple what they did to many American crops: they moved it. Within a few decades of contact it had been carried to West Africa, to India, to Southeast Asia and the East Indies, and eventually to the Pacific, spreading along the sea routes far faster than it could ever have spread by land. By the seventeenth century it was growing in tropical Asia and Africa well enough that later European visitors sometimes assumed it was native there. It is not; every pineapple in the Old World descends from a plant carried out of the Americas.

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Where the Names Come From

Two naming stories run in parallel, and both are visible in the words we still use.

The Indigenous name survived in science. Tupi-speaking peoples called the fruit something recorded by Europeans as nanás or nanas, glossed in early sources as meaning an excellent or fragrant fruit. That word travelled into Portuguese, French, Dutch, German, and most other European languages — ananas is the ordinary word for pineapple across most of Europe today. It also survives in the accepted botanical name, Ananas comosus. Linnaeus originally placed the plant in Bromelia; the combination now used is credited to the American botanist Elmer Drew Merrill, which is why the name is written Ananas comosus (L.) Merr.

English went its own way, and got there by accident. In Middle English, pineapple meant the cone of a pine tree — literally the apple of the pine, since "apple" was long used loosely for fruits in general. When the new fruit arrived and reminded everyone of a pine cone, English speakers simply transferred the existing word. The old sense faded, "pine cone" took its place, and English ended up as one of the few major languages calling the fruit anything other than a version of ananas.

Spanish took a third route with the same image: piña, meaning pine cone, still the ordinary Spanish word, and in early accounts piña de Indias — the pine cone of the Indies. The Philippine fabric piña, woven from pineapple leaf fibre, carries that Spanish name into a textile tradition on the other side of the world, which is a neat compression of the whole colonial journey into a single word.

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European Pineapple Mania

This is the extraordinary part of the story, and it turns on a simple logistical fact: a pineapple would not survive the trip.

Sailing from the Caribbean to northern Europe took weeks under sail. Ripe pineapples ferment and rot in a fraction of that time, and they cannot be picked hard and ripened later the way a banana can — a pineapple harvested unripe stays sour. The overwhelming majority of fruit loaded in the West Indies arrived spoiled or arrived not at all. Meanwhile the plant itself refused to grow in a European climate: it is a tropical perennial that dies in frost and needs many months of warmth to bring a single fruit to maturity.

Rarity plus overwhelming reputation produced one of the great luxury manias of European history. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the pineapple became a byword for wealth in Britain, the Netherlands, and France:

It is worth pausing on how strange this is. The fruit that a Guadeloupean household kept as ordinary provisions in 1493 had become, two centuries later, an object that a European aristocrat could not reliably obtain at any price. The gap was pure distance and pure perishability — and closing it became an obsession.

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The Pineries

If you cannot ship a pineapple, grow one. That ambition produced a specialised branch of horticulture and some of the most elaborate gardening technology of the eighteenth century.

A pinery was a heated glasshouse built for pineapples, and the hard problem it solved was not air temperature but root temperature. Pineapples need warm soil for many months continuously, and eighteenth-century heating was crude. The solution was beautifully low-technology: a deep pit filled with fermenting tanner's bark — spent oak bark from the leather trade, a waste product available in quantity — which as it decomposed gave off a steady, gentle bottom heat for months at a time, far more reliably than flues or stoves. Pots of pineapple plants were plunged into the bark bed. Renewing and turning the tan was skilled, laborious work, and a good pinery gardener was a valuable man.

The technique reached England from the Netherlands, where Dutch growers had been experimenting since the late seventeenth century. The best-documented early English success is the pinery of Sir Matthew Decker at Richmond, where around 1714–1715 his gardener Henry Telende brought pineapples to fruit using a tan-bark hotbed — the achievement Netscher's 1720 painting was commissioned to record. From there the practice spread through the great estates. Where money was no object, the ambition escalated: heated walls, glasshouse ranges, and combined pinery-vineries that grew grapes and pineapples under the same roof.

The most flamboyant surviving monument to all this is not a greenhouse but a joke in stone. At Dunmore, in Scotland, a garden pavilion is crowned by an enormous carved stone pineapple, dated 1761, standing above the walled garden where the real ones were grown. It survives, in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, as the most literal possible statement of what the fruit meant: a building that is the boast.

Pineries were finished off by the nineteenth century, and not by any failure of horticulture. Steamships crossed the Atlantic in days rather than weeks; refrigerated and fast transport made imported fruit viable; and cheap Caribbean and later Azorean imports undercut a fruit that cost a fortune in coal, glass, tan bark, and skilled labour. The hothouses were converted or abandoned. The pineapple stopped being a trophy and started being a commodity — and the next chapter of the story is about who grew it, and under what conditions.

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The Hospitality Symbol and Its Legend

The pineapple is the standard Western emblem of hospitality. It appears carved on gateposts, newel posts, and door surrounds; moulded into plasterwork and ironwork; stamped on tableware, napkins, bedheads, and the signage of inns and hotels. In parts of colonial-era North America and eighteenth-century Britain the motif is genuinely everywhere once you start looking.

The origin usually given for that symbolism, however, is almost certainly a story rather than a history. The popular account runs that a New England sea captain returning from the West Indies would spike a pineapple on his gatepost to announce that he was home and that visitors were welcome to call. It is a charming image, it is repeated in guidebooks and tourist boards across the eastern United States, and there is no contemporary documentary evidence for it. Food and material-culture historians treat it as folklore of much later origin, retro-fitted to explain a motif whose real explanation is simpler.

The simpler explanation is that the pineapple meant expense. Setting one before guests was the most conspicuous generosity available to a host, because everyone at the table knew what it had cost and what it had taken to obtain. From there the association hardened into a decorative convention, and the convention outlived the scarcity that created it — which is why a fruit that now costs a couple of dollars is still carved on the gateposts of houses whose owners have no idea why.

The habit of carving pineapples predates the American colonial furniture that made the motif famous. The pine-cone-and-pineapple finial has a long ornamental history in European architecture, and the two shapes are close enough that they blur together in stonework, which is part of why the motif spread so easily.

Presented honestly, then: the symbolism is real and well attested; the sea-captain story is legend. The site treats it the way it treats the Catherine de' Medici spinach story and the Popeye iron myth on the spinach history page — as a good tale worth telling, clearly labelled as one.

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James Dole and the Hawaiian Century

The twentieth-century pineapple is a Hawaiian story, and it begins with a young man with a small inheritance.

James Drummond Dole arrived in Hawaii from Massachusetts in 1899, shortly after the United States annexed the islands, and bought land at Wahiawā on O‘ahu. He planted pineapples, and in 1901 founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Company — the ancestor of today's Dole Food Company. The choice of crop was shrewd: pineapple thrived on Hawaii's well-drained volcanic uplands, and the islands' new political relationship with the United States gave Hawaiian produce access to the American market on favourable terms.

The problem was the same one that had defeated Europe for three centuries — the fruit could not travel. Dole's answer was not to move fruit but to move cans. Canning had existed for decades; what the Hawaiian industry did was industrialise it around this one crop, with machinery built specifically for pineapples. The Ginaca machine, developed for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in the early 1910s, peeled, cored, and sized fruit at a rate no hand crew could approach, and it turned pineapple canning into a genuinely mass-production business.

Ambition scaled with the machinery. In 1922 Dole bought most of the island of Lāna‘i and turned it into a single vast plantation — the "Pineapple Island" — with a company town built to work it. For much of the twentieth century Hawaii dominated the world's canned pineapple supply, and the pineapple became, alongside sugar, the economic and demographic engine of the islands.

That engine ran on imported labour, and this part belongs in the record. Hawaii's plantations recruited workers from China, Japan, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Korea, and above all the Philippines, housed in segregated camps, paid at rates set by the companies, and governed by a small, tightly interlocked group of firms. The multi-ethnic society of modern Hawaii is in large measure the descendant population of that recruitment. Conditions were hard and organising was long resisted, but in the 1940s the plantation workforce unionised effectively under the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the strikes of that decade — sugar in 1946, pineapple in 1947 — substantially raised plantation wages. Richard Hawkins's history of pineapple canning in Hawaii traces the industry from its speculative early boom through the post-1941 period, and Gary Okihiro's Pineapple Culture reads the same industry as a story about empire and race rather than only about agriculture.

Better wages, in the end, were part of what moved the industry away. Once canneries could be built in the Philippines and Thailand at a fraction of Hawaiian labour costs, the Hawaiian plantations could not compete on price. The decline ran through the second half of the century: Dole closed its Lāna‘i plantation in 1992, Del Monte ended its Hawaii operations in the following decade, and Maui Land & Pineapple stopped commercial pineapple growing in 2009. Hawaii still grows pineapples, mostly for the local and fresh market and for visitors; the industry that once defined the islands is gone.

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The Can That Made It Ordinary

It is worth stopping to appreciate the reversal that canning achieved, because it is one of the most complete in the history of food.

For four hundred years the pineapple's entire meaning came from the fact that it could not be had. The can dissolved that in a generation. A sealed tin of pineapple rings is shelf-stable for years, ships anywhere, needs no refrigeration, and cost, by the mid-twentieth century, a trivial sum. The fruit that had been rented for an evening in Georgian London became a store-cupboard staple in an ordinary kitchen, and pineapple rings turned up in the era's most homely dishes — on gammon, in upside-down cake, in salads set in jelly, and on the pizza that has been starting arguments ever since.

There was a technical footnote to this that connects the history to the chemistry. Canned pineapple is heat-processed, and heat destroys the fruit's protein-digesting enzyme. That is why canned pineapple sets in a jelly and fresh pineapple never will — a fact explained in full in the Bromelain deep dive. Mid-century recipe writers used canned fruit for jellied salads not out of thrift but because it was the only version that worked.

The same industry created the other pineapple product of the twentieth century: bromelain itself. Canning generates enormous quantities of stems, cores, crowns, and skins with no food value, and extracting the enzyme from that waste stream turned a disposal cost into a saleable commodity. Nearly all the clinical research on bromelain rests on material that exists because somebody was canning pineapple at scale.

The reversal is complete, and it is worth naming plainly: the pineapple stopped being a symbol of wealth at the exact moment it became available to everyone. The carved gateposts stayed.

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Costa Rica, the Philippines, and MD-2

Two changes reshaped the pineapple again in the last forty years: production moved, and the fruit itself was replaced.

Production moved. Air freight and refrigerated shipping finally solved the problem that had defined the fruit for five centuries, and fresh pineapple became a normal item in supermarkets far from the tropics. That shifted the industry's centre of gravity toward countries with the right climate, low production costs, and good logistics. Costa Rica became the dominant supplier of fresh pineapple to North American and European markets, while the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, India, China, and Nigeria are among the largest producers by volume, much of it for canning and juice. Current figures change every year and are best read from the FAO's own statistics rather than from any static page; a link is in the resources below.

That transition has its own costs, and an honest history should say so. Intensive export pineapple cultivation in Costa Rica has been the subject of sustained reporting and regulatory attention over pesticide use, contamination of local water supplies, deforestation for new plantings, and labour conditions on plantations, with migrant workers from Nicaragua making up a large share of the workforce. The pineapple's history of cheap fruit resting on cheap labour did not end when the plantations left Hawaii.

The fruit itself changed. For most of the twentieth century the world's pineapple was Smooth Cayenne, the cultivar that suited canning: large, cylindrical, high in acid, with the right shape for a Ginaca machine. It is not, however, ideal for eating fresh — it is sharp, its flesh is pale, and it bruises.

Its replacement came out of the Hawaiian industry's own research arm. The Pineapple Research Institute of Hawaii, funded by the island companies, ran a long breeding programme whose hybrid designated 73-114 was developed commercially by Del Monte and launched in the 1990s as MD-2, sold at retail as "Gold" or "Extra Sweet". MD-2 is sweeter and much lower in acid than Smooth Cayenne, deep golden rather than pale, higher in vitamin C, and it holds up far better in transport and on a shelf.

It took over almost completely. Within roughly a decade MD-2 displaced Smooth Cayenne as the standard fresh-export pineapple, and it is now the reference cultivar in the agronomic literature — modern crop-modelling papers are written about MD-2 because that is what is in the ground. If you have bought a fresh pineapple in a supermarket in the last twenty years, it was almost certainly MD-2, and if you remember pineapple tasting sharper when you were younger, you are probably remembering Smooth Cayenne rather than misremembering your childhood.

There is a quiet symmetry in that. The variety now eaten around the world came out of the last decades of the Hawaiian industry, developed by the research institute of companies whose plantations were about to close, and was commercialised in Central America — a few hundred miles from the Caribbean islands where Columbus's crew first saw the fruit, and a long way south of where Indigenous farmers first domesticated it.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines peer-reviewed work on the origin, genetics, and domestication of Ananas comosus with scholarly histories of the fruit and its industry. Early writers named in the article — Chanca, Peter Martyr, Oviedo — appear as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are plain text; only the stable identifier is linked, and every link opens in a new tab.

  1. Ming R, VanBuren R, Wai CM, et al. The pineapple genome and the evolution of CAM photosynthesis. Nature Genetics. 2015;47(12):1435-1442. — doi:10.1038/ng.3435
  2. Chen LY, VanBuren R, Paris M, et al. The bracteatus pineapple genome and domestication of clonally propagated crops. Nature Genetics. 2019;51(10):1549-1558. — doi:10.1038/s41588-019-0506-8
  3. Duval MF, Noyer JL, Perrier X, Coppens d'Eeckenbrugge G, Hamon P. Molecular diversity in pineapple assessed by RFLP markers. Theoretical and Applied Genetics. 2001;102(1):83-90. — doi:10.1007/s001220051621
  4. Duval MF, Buso GSC, Ferreira FR, et al. Relationships in Ananas and other related genera using chloroplast DNA restriction site variation. Genome. 2003;46(6):990-1004. — doi:10.1139/g03-074
  5. Botella JR, Smith M. Genomics of pineapple, crowning the king of tropical fruits. In: Plant Genetics and Genomics: Crops and Models. Springer. — doi:10.1007/978-0-387-71219-2_18
  6. Hochstrasser J. The Pineapple: From Domestication to Commodification. Amsterdam University Press. — doi:10.2307/jj.31510134
  7. Beauman F. Perfect is the pineapple. Petits Propos Culinaires. 2003;(73). — the author of The Pineapple: King of Fruits (2005), the standard popular history of the European pineapple craze. — doi:10.1558/ppc.30286
  8. Okihiro GY. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones. University of California Press; 2009. — doi:10.1525/9780520942950
  9. Okihiro GY. Pineapple diaspora. In: Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones. University of California Press; 2009. — doi:10.1525/9780520942950-007
  10. Hawkins RA. Pineapple fever, 1898–1914. In: A Pacific Industry: The History of Pineapple Canning in Hawaii. I.B. Tauris; 2011. — doi:10.5040/9780755698400.ch-002
  11. Hawkins RA. The Hawaiian pineapple industry since 1941. In: A Pacific Industry: The History of Pineapple Canning in Hawaii. I.B. Tauris; 2011. — doi:10.5040/9780755698400.ch-009
  12. Popenoe W. Manual of Tropical and Subtropical Fruits. Macmillan; 1920. — an early twentieth-century horticultural account of pineapple cultivation, digitised by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. — doi:10.5962/bhl.title.43926
  13. Predicting growth and development of the pineapple cultivar 'MD-2' with the DSSAT Aloha-Pineapple model. Fruits. 2024. — an illustration of MD-2's status as the reference cultivar in current agronomy. — doi:10.17660/th2024/002
  14. Sun GM, Zhang XM, Soler A, Marie-Alphonsine PA. Nutritional composition of pineapple (Ananas comosus (L.) Merr.). In: Nutritional Composition of Fruit Cultivars. Academic Press; 2016:609-637. — doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-408117-8.00025-8

External Authoritative Resources

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  1. PubMed: Ananas comosus domestication and genetic diversity
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