Why Your Roses Smell Nice - Issue 57 : Communities
▻http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/why-your-roses-smell-nice
The appeal of many floral scents to humans is a fortunate byproduct: We were not even around when they appeared. And, for all the effort, commercial perfumes rarely smell like flowers. Expensive, fancy bottles labeled jasmine or gardenia may smell wonderful but they are sad substitutes for the real thing. One reason is that flowers generally produce very large mixtures of different volatile molecules, as many as a thousand. Some of these fall into related chemical groups and although they differ very slightly in chemical structure, they can produce very different smells. In closely related flowers, the volatile molecules can vary both in relative amounts (reflecting differential regulation of the genes and gene products needed) and in their chemical structures (reflecting the activity (...)