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The paper
P. Liao et al., “Cuticle thickness affects dynamics of volatile emission from petunia flowers,” Nat Chem Biol, doi:10.1038/s41589-020-00670-w, 2020.
Many flowers emit sweet scents to lure pollinators. Those fragrant molecules can, however, cause damage if they begin to collect in the flowers’ cells.
To escape into the air, a petunia’s scent molecules, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), have to travel through their cells’ cytoplasm, cross an inner membrane and then the cell wall, and finally move through a waxy cuticle. Scientists long thought that diffusion drove the release of the molecules, but in 2015, computer simulations revealed that VOCs can’t diffuse out of flower cells quickly enough to prevent internal damage to the plant.
In follow-up experiments to find out how the fragrance molecules might escape the plants, Purdue University biochemist Natalia Dudareva and colleagues found that when the flowers opened and became pungent, ...
