查看文章

Plants have a penchant for perfuming the atmosphere around them. Since antiquity it has been known that both floral and vegetative parts of many species emit substances with distinctive smells. The discovery of the gaseous hormone ethylene 70 years ago brought the realization that at least some of the compounds emitted may have physiological significance without any distinctive smell to humans. At present, more than 1,000 low Mr organic compounds have been reported to be emitted from plants, although a comprehensive list is available only for floral volatiles (Knudsen et al., 1993). Our knowledge of the occurrence and distribution of plant volatiles has been significantly extended in the last 15 years thanks to the adoption of simple, sensitive methods for headspace sampling and the availability of relatively inexpensive bench-top instruments for gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The substances …