A Rose By Any Other Name

Have you noticed that most roses don't have much fragrance? They're huge and colorful with many bright blooms bigger than a baseball (actually a softball but the alliteration was irresistible). But they smell like... plants.

Scientists are now trying to put the fragrance back into the flowers.

No one knows what's responsible for this waning of fragrance by roses and other ornamental-flower varieties, including carnations and chrysanthemums, but scientists who investigate floral scent suspect that the flower breeding that's led to an estimated 18,000 rose cultivars in an ever-widening spectrum has run roughshod over fragrance.

"Pigment compounds are derived from the same biochemical precursors [as scent compounds are], so it makes sense that if you make more of one you get less of the other," notes floral-scent biochemist and geneticist Eran Pichersky of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
...
In the past few years, flower scientists have assembled enough knowledge and technology to consider resurrecting scents in flowers that have lost them or engineering plants that produce scents never before experienced by a bee, beetle, or gardener.

Save the Flowers, ScienceNews, Week of Sept. 24, 2005 (Vol. 168, No. 13, p. 202)

A Rose By Any Other Name ( in category Nature/Cats ) - posted at Tue, 27 Sep, 08:07 Pacific | «e»