The name Reckless It probably won’t tell you much, unless you have had the luck (or bad luck) to see one live at the moment of flowering. In addition to having one of the largest flowers in the world, in fact, Reckless It is one of those species that has given up pleasant odors to issue instead a terrible stench of putrefaction.
A rare (but not too) strategy, bizarre but which has its own logic and now, thanks to a study published on Scienceone Biochemical explanationwhich also indicates a curious link with humans.
Looking for smells in the genome. The genre studied by the Team of the University of Tokyo is not actually not Reckless but Asarumthat as its best known relative USA The strategy of making its flowers stink of death. If you think about it, it is not difficult to understand the logic behind this adaptation: By emitting the smell of codary in putrefaction, these plants attract many pollinatorsfrom flies to ants, convinced that he has just found a tasty banquet of meat and/or excrements.
Asarum It includes almost one hundred different species, 53 of which have been studied by the Japanese team, which has it sequenzaiated the genome In search of the differences between the species that smell of putrefied meat and those that instead focus on more “normal” smells. The comparison made it possible to identify the genetic base of the terrible stinks of Asarum.
The convergent evolution of the stench. Surprisingly, It is a gene, SBP1which is very similar, from an evolutionary point of view, to a gene that we humans use to obtain the result opposite to that of plants: in fact, it is used to de-find a compound called a sad blend, responsible for our bad breath. Plants of the genre Asarum They found a way to “overturn” the function of this gene, and the result is that terrible smell that also attracts tourists and curious in the botanical gardens that host them.
The study of the genomes of Asarum He also showed that the tactic of … stinking of death is relatively recent, having evolved in the last dozen millions of years. Not only that: the study identifies at least two other species not to learn with Asarum who developed the same mechanism, in a case as a convergent evolution manual. The next step will be to find out if the other plants that stink, including the indepel Recklessuse the same genetic technique.
