DMT by any other name would smell as sweet
In this lovely house we rent in Toulouse, there is an in-ground greenhouse with numerous old rose varieties. The damasks and the bourbon roses are remarkably perfumed. I made a gorgeous bouquet this week with a number of these, a couple sprigs of white lilac and some snapdragons.
Grr. I went to the trouble of taking a photo of it, editing it on my computer and trying to upload it, to find out that I can’t for some reason. Well, I’ll take the long way around.
So I was sent some suggested reading from a colleague (“for the beach” quoth he, though I’ll be going to the misty mountains to join my husband for the second long weekend in May so far) in PNAS, and was drawn instead to “Scent evolution in Chinese roses“.
My compliments for a simple title. The article is not, but is a great example of cross-disciplinary fertilization. These are some of the folks who did the work. I see that Roger Highfield did the work of breaking down the results to make them digestible to a public audience as soon as it came off the feed.
Myself, I really appreciated the mix of genetics, bioinformatics, plant biology, crystallography, chemistry and enzyme kinetics. However, I don’t seem to have any tea roses blooming right now (not sure there are any in the garden), so I’ll have to settle for the “floral-fruity character with a plum-like shading” of beta-damascenone, which is tantalizing to the point of making me salivate. Before moving here, I would not have qualified myself as a rose enthusiast.
Posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 5:00 pm Categorized as:general science, personal You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
