Physiology, genetics and manipulation of flower fragrance

Chinese. 花朵香味的分子实质是一类具有较低分子量的挥发性分子,主要包括类萜、苯型烃与苯丙素类、脂肪酸及其衍生物和一些含氮含硫化合物。花朵的香味与人类关系密切,但因其难以定量定性和缺少合适的突变体筛选方法,目前其研究水平远滞后于花形、花色等花朵的其他重要性状。近年来,随着分子生物学的发展,花香领域的研究也呈现出加速发展的趋势,目前对这类分子在植物体内的生物合成途径已有不少了解,相关途径中的关键酶基因已被相继克隆。这些工作使人们通过引入新的香味物质合成基因或增强原有基因的表达来改变花朵的香味成为可能。本文介绍了近年来花朵香味的生物学功能、检测手段、代谢途径、分子生物学及基因工程等方面的研究进展,并对今后的研究趋势进行了展望。

English. Flower fragrance is composed of various volatile low-molecular-weight chemicals, mostly belonging to four major groups： terpenoids, benzenoids and phenylpropanoids, fatty acid derivatives, and nitrogen and sulfur containing compounds. Although there is a close relationship between humankind and flower fragrance, the biochemistry and molecular biology of floral fragrance would be much more poorly understoodings than that of other important flower characters, such as flower morphology and color. Due to the invisibility and the highly variable nature of this trait, no simple and efficient methods to identify genetic variations has been developed so far. In recent years, the growing progress in flower fragrance research has been made with the rapid developments of molecular and biochemical techniques, for example, several biosynthetic pathways of fragrance compounds have been elucidated and many genes encoding key enzymes involved in these pathways have been cloned. It would be well benefits from these works for manipulating flower fragrance by expressing or up-regulating key enzymes in fragrance compound biosynthetic pathways. In this paper, the major advances and future prospects in this fields was reviewed.