This study describes for the first time the chemical composition and olfactive description of floral scent from Brazilian Passiflora (Passiflora edulis Sim, Passiflora alata Curtis, Passiflora cincinnata Mast., Passiflora coccinea Aubl. and Passiflora quadrangularis L.). Five species were grown in greenhouse at the Agronomic Institute (IAC), São Paulo, Brazil. Volatile compounds were collected ...

We localized the tissues and cells that contribute to scent biosynthesis in scented and non-scented Rosa x hybrida cultivars as part of a detailed cytological analysis of the rose petal. Adaxial petal epidermal cells have a typical conical, papillate shape whereas abaxial petal epidermal cells are flat. Using two different techniques, solid/liquid phase extraction and headspace collection of vo...

Floral odor is a key trait for pollinator attraction in many plants, but may also direct antagonists like herbivores to flowers. In this study, we examined how floral scent changes after pollination in Silene latifolia, which has a specialized relationship with the seed predator Hadena bicruris. We found an overall decrease in total scent emission and considerable changes in relative amounts of...

Many plants attract and reward pollinators with floral scents and nectar, respectively, but these traits can also incur fitness costs as they also attract herbivores. This dilemma, common to most flowering plants, could be solved by not producing nectar and/or scent, thereby cheating pollinators. Both nectar and scent are highly variable in native populations of coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenu...

The vomeronasal system is one of several fine-tuned scent-detecting signaling systems in mammals. However, despite significant efforts, how these receptors detect scent remains an enigma. One reason is the lack of sufficient purified receptors to perform detailed biochemical, biophysical and structural analyses. Here we report the ability to express and purify milligrams of purified, functional...

All animals harbor beneficial microbes. One way these microbes can benefit their animal hosts is by increasing the diversity and efficacy of communication signals available to the hosts. The fermentation hypothesis for mammalian chemical communication posits that bacteria in the scent glands of mammals generate odorous metabolites used by their hosts for communication and that variation in host...

SNIF-ACT (Scent-based Navigation and Information Foraging in the ACT architecture) has been developed to simulate users as they perform unfamiliar information-seeking tasks on the World Wide Web (WWW). SNIF-ACT selects actions based on the measure of information scent, which is calculated by a spreading activation mechanism that captures the mutual relevance of the contents of a WWW page to the...

scent sensitivities attribute to chemical fragrances is a lengthy one that includes everything from coughing, sneezing, gagging, shortness of breath, rhinitis and asthma attacks, to debilitating headaches, anxiety and dizziness. As a result, many workplaces and institutions — schools, hospitals and other government buildings — have some sort of scent-free or scent-reduction policy in place, whi...

The Stochastic Competitive Evolutionary Neural Tree (SCENT) is a new unsupervised neural net that dynamically evolves a representational structure in response to its training data. Uniquely SCENT requires no initial parameter setting as it autonomously creates appropriate parameterisation at runtime. Pruning and convergence are stochastically controlled using locally calculated heuristics. A th...